September 4, 2008
More data on data warehouse sizes and issues
I spoke today with Paul Barth and Randy Bean of consultancy NewVantage Partners. The core of NewVantage’s business seems to be helping large enterprises (especially financial services) with their data warehouse strategies. Takeaways — none of which should shock regular readers of DBMS2 — included:
- Administrative cost and difficulty are often the single biggest issue in selecting analytic DBMS products.
- Oracle hits a wall around 10 terabytes of user data. The one customer NewVantage can think of with an Oracle data warehouse over 10 terabytes is fleeing Oracle for Netezza.
- NewVantage says that very specialized data warehouses on Oracle could conceivably be larger than that.
- NewVantage does have a customer on DB2/UDB in the 30-40 terabyte range. That customer does a lot of careful tuning to make it work.
- About 15% of NewVantage’s customers use Netezza. Few if any use newer analytic DBMS (but I got the sense more will soon). The rest rely on “traditional” DBMS, a group that includes Teradata.
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Curt: These observations are drawn from large-scale data warehouse implementations for very large financial service and Fortune 1000 firms, and from monthly executive roundtable dinners we host with the CIO’s of these firms. We are seeing a gradual embrace of analytical data marts or “sandboxes” for high-impact business activities where time-to-market is a major factor.