December 14, 2008

Kognitio and WX-2 update

I went to Bracknell Wednesday to spend time with the Kognitio team. I think I came away with a better understanding of what the technology is all about, and why certain choices have been made.

Like almost every other contender in the market,* Kognitio WX-2 queries disk-based data in the usual way. Even so, WX-2’s design is very RAM-centric. Data gets on and off disk in mind-numbingly simple ways – table scans only, round-robin partitioning only (as opposed to the more common hash), and no compression. However, once the data is in RAM, WX-2 gets to work, happily redistributing as seems optimal, with little concern about which node retrieved the data in the first place. (I must confess that I don’t yet understand why this strategy doesn’t create ridiculous network bottlenecks.) How serious is Kognitio about RAM? Well, they believe they’re in the process of selling a system that will include 40 terabytes of the stuff. Apparently, the total hardware cost will be in the $4 million range.

*Exasol is the big exception. They basically use disk as a source from which to instantiate in-memory databases.

Other technical highlights of the Kognitio WX-2 story include:

Non-technical highlights include:

Comments

2 Responses to “Kognitio and WX-2 update”

  1. How to buy an analytic DBMS (overview) | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on December 15th, 2008 5:15 am

    […] for a couple of days last week, at the behest of Kognitio. Since I was in the neighborhood anyway, I visited their offices for a briefing. But the main driver for the trip was a seminar Thursday at which I was the featured speaker. As […]

  2. The “baseball bat” test for analytic DBMS and data warehouse appliances | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on February 7th, 2009 1:56 pm

    […] benchmark honcho Gene Erickson definitely encourages this kind of behavior. Kognitio – which sees “resilience” as a competitive advantage and reports that prospects increasingly […]

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