February 26, 2008

Introduction to Exasol

I had a non-technical introduction today to Exasol, a data warehouse specialist that has gotten a little buzz recently for publishing TPC-H results even faster than ParAccel’s. Here are some highlights:

Exasol was founded back in 2000.
Exasol is a German company, with 60 employees. While I didn’t ask, the vast majority are surely German.
Exasol has two customers. 6-8 more are Coming Real Soon. Most or all of those are in Germany, although one may be in Asia.
Karstadt (big German retailer) has had Exasol deployed for 3 years. The other deployed customer is the German subsidiary of data provider IMS Health.
[Redacted for confidentiality] is a strategic investor in and partner of Exasol. [Redacted for confidentiality]’s only competing partnership is with Oracle.
Exasol’s system is more completely written from scratch than many. E.g., all they use from Linux are some drivers, and maybe a microkernel.
Exasol runs in-memory. There doesn’t seem to be a disk-centric mode.
Exasol’s data access methods are sort of like columnar, but not exactly. I look forward to a more technical discussion to sort that out.
Exasol’s claimed typical compression is 5-7X. As in the Vertica story, database operations are carried out on compressed data.
Exasol says it has performed a very fast TPC-H inhouse at the 30 terabyte level. However, its deployed sites are probably a lot smaller than that. IMS Health is cited in its literature as 145 gigabytes.
Oracle and Microsoft are listed as Exasol partners, so there may be some kind of plug-compatibility or back-end processing story.