We received a very nice Holiday Card today from one of our investors, First Round Capital, that we helped create

Rob Hayes visited our office in early December with a hand-held video camera asking us to dance! I was quite nervous us filming the video: I had of course seen Matt’s “Where the hell is Matt” video. The untold back-story is that we’re supposed to just start dancing to an imagined tune: there is no-one keeping beats or playing a song!

The end-result is equal parts goofy and equal parts fun! Happy holidays!!

With all the hype in the analytic database and database appliance market around “100x performance!” and “dramatic cost savings!”, we’ve stayed away from making bold, unsubstantiated claims of our own.  Instead, we’ve chosen to talk about the ability for companies to “do more” with their data through advanced analytics powered by Aster’s In-Database MapReduce, etc.

However, Aster does provide some unique cost and time advantages. We’ve produced a technical brief and webcast which outline the four main areas where Aster can help you lower your data warehousing costs:

[1] Hardware (Aster uses off-the-shelf commodity hardware - no proprietary appliances)

[2] Management (Aster makes it really simple to manage a large distributed database system)

[3] Scaling (you can scale incrementally and easily)

[4] Downtime (Aster doesn’t need any for administration and can recover on its own from any failures)

Check it out and let us know what you think.