I’m not even going to look at a 2001 Gartner quote, unless it’s for historical reasons.

http://www.monash.com/adviseusers.html may be relevant, however.

We are currently in the process of selecting a DBMS vendor and I am trying to compare the TCO of different vendors. I came across this article quoting Gartner research:

http://www.teradata.com/library/pdf/tco.pdf

This seems dated (2001) and wondering what relevance it has in today’s market. Can you comment?

Thank you
Arvind.

Not to worry. Experience shows that trackback technology is not exactly bulletproof …

Best,

CAM

Thx,

– amr

General Philosophy Extreme Lucidity Products Cloudera Cloud Service Customers Market Research Scale Unlimited Survey…

Exactly.

But the real reason it’s not in those slides is just a matter of expository flow. The points you raised were in the words of my talk much more than they were in the slides.

And even so the word “cost” is in them at least twice. I checked.

My theory is that a large fraction of the discussion boils down to TCO anyway. Cash cost for license and maintenance fees may or may not be a big part of overall TCO. And to the frustration of my clients at Kognitio, I’m not in love with the argument that eliminating capex is a huge benefit in and of itself. After all, one can usually just lease the equipment one buys.

Regarding budgets, (to further argue against myself), there’s the truism that data integration and cleansing can be expensive, and open source does not eliminate those labor costs.

I certainly agree that the “Are you hopelessly prejudiced?” class of questions is important. But while “Are you hopelessly prejudiced in favor of your incumbent DBMS?” and “Are you hopelessly prejudiced against specialized hardware?” will each get enough “Yes”es to be deserve top billing, I don’t see the same sort of commitment yet to data warehousing SaaS. It’s a rare buyer that won’t seriously consider an inhouse solution.

As for “Check your budget” — I seriously hope I don’t have to put THAT on a slide in an hour-long talk.

CAM

Kognitio’s isn’t the only hosted analytical DBMS that comes to mind of course. There’s also, for instance, LucidEra for folks doing performance management. And — the reason I mention LucidEra particularly — there’s what should possibly be your question 8:

8. What’s your budget?

That question springs relates to LucidEra because the analytical DBMS that backs LucidEra, LucidDB, if free, open source, as are the MonetDB analytical DBMS and MySQL+Infobright.