The Way We Were

Well, it's New Year's Day, and here I sit in my drafty New England garret ready to contemplate the most significant opportunity last year in the intersecting worlds of relational databases and quants. I have to give the laurels to the Obama quants, who ousted the political operatives, and set out to do political quant better than their opposition. One might give a thorny crown to the Romney crew, who did things the crony way (letting the loyal political hacks make the decisions), but that would be cruel. Previously cited, here is the story. Given that the DNC came a cropper in state and local elections, ceding yet more control to the Republicans, one can't conclude that Democrats are naturally more adept at quant.

A few honorable mentions:

- SSD land turned into a mine field. OCZ nearly went belly up, and might yet still. Consumer/prosumer SSD has fallen to commodity status; we can expect the Big Boys to dominate going forward. STEC found trouble, and is still in it. Fusion-io has been largely static. Flash arrays, from the bigger companies, gained mindshare; the quote from Linus is closer to true now than last New Year's.

- NoSql and NOSql fought with each other and against SQL for mindshare. On the whole, NOSql appears to have bested NoSql, but I stand by Date's quote. If you care about your data, you have to have a central control, i.e. a TPM, and Kiddie Koders who think they can gin up a replacement (in client code, no less) for any of the industrial strength engines that have been developed over the last two decades are kidding themselves (and any Suit dumb enough to buy the story).

- R, and other analytics, get closer integration with databases; SAP/HANA/R notably. But not, so far as I can tell, Sql Server. That part is too bad.

- Violin was reported to IPO at $2 billion in October, but hasn't happened yet. Enterprise SSD may yet still live as something more than just HDD cache.