SANTA MONICA, Calif., Nov. 21, 2008 [PR2WEB] — Business.com, the leading business search engine, directory and pay-per-click advertising network, announced today the availability of CloudBase™, a high-performance data warehouse system that scales horizontally on commodity hardware or a cloud computing network.  Built on top of a map-reduce architecture, this technology enables business analysts using ANSI SQL to directly query large-scale log files arising in web site, telecommunications or IT operations. Now even small businesses will be able to quickly analyze log data without the cost and complexity of maintaining large relational database management system (RDBMS) clusters.

“We developed CloudBase to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of transforming terabyte-scale web log files into actionable insights for improving user experience and business results,” said Paul Dagum, Chief Scientist and Strategy Officer, R.H. Donnelley Interactive (RHDi). “By inventing, developing and releasing open source technology like CloudBase, Business.com continues to demonstrate both our leadership in the online space and our overall focus on helping businesses quickly find solutions to their most pressing challenges.”

Web log analysis is critical to understanding and improving user experience and site performance.  Given the cost constraints faced by small- to mid-sized companies in today’s economy, Business.com chose to make CloudBase available to the general public as a free, open-source application. “Key insights about site user behavior and performance remain out of reach for small internet and ecommerce sites because of the exorbitant amount of time and expense necessary to go from flat files to ETL to a performance-ready RDBMS cluster. We launched CloudBase as a free, open-source application to open-up this black box for small- and mid-sized businesses,” said Dagum.

There have been hundreds of downloads of the CloudBase application since it was made available on SourceForge.net in late October and users are beginning to test CloudBase for various applications. According to Byron S. Lee, VP of Engineering for LogLogic, “The scalability and improved price performance of the CloudBase Hadoop/Map Reduce project shows tremendous promise for use in the analysis of massive amounts of log data related to compliance, security and operations.”

CloudBase is developed to Hadoop’s map-reduce implementation.  But, unlike other map-reduce approaches, it does not create or require the use of a programming language on top of map-reduce. CloudBase creates a database system directly on flat files and converts input ANSI SQL expressions into map-reduce programs for processing flat files. Existing applications such as reporting programs, data mining applications using ANSI SQL, business intelligence tools, and OLAP systems can use CloudBase to access massive log files without the user having to rewrite the application program.

CloudBase is available for download on SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloudbase/).  A public Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is available in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

About Business.com
Business.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of R.H. Donnelley Corporation, (NYSE: RHD), is the leading business search engine, directory and pay-per-click advertising network, serving more than 40 million business users and thousands of advertisers every month. Business.com helps business decision makers quickly find what they need to manage and grow their businesses, and enables business-to-business marketing professionals to reach these users wherever they are across the business Internet through premier partners, including Forbes, Hoovers, and Financial Times. Business.com has been named to the Inc. 500 as well as BtoB Magazine's Media Power 50.  The company was recently named to Los Angeles Business Journal's List of Best Places to Work for the second consecutive year.

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