I don’t think database management is a subset of “business intelligence”. And while you’re probably not alone in disagreeing with me, I think you’re in a small minority. So I’m not terribly concerned about confusion on that score.

Anyhow, blog category names are hardly meant to comprise a precise or complete industry taxonomy.

you categorized Analytics technology into the following groups, what is your reasoning behind that?
Analytics technology
* Business intelligence
* Data mart outsourcing
* Data warehousing
* MOLAP

Should not BI be the umbrella name? I feel you need to provide some explanation to avoid any misunderstanding i.e.,

Business intelligence
* Analytics
* Data mart outsourcing
* Data warehousing
* MOLAP

http://www.netezza.com/releases/2007/release073107.htm

The number of “concurrent users” which can be supported is a matter of how many queries can be executed in a certain time period, not how many queries can be executed at the same time.

A properly designed MPP database should be able to give close to 100% of the system resources to a query if it is running by itself, 50% each if 2 queries are running, etc. A workload management system has to exist primarily to keep the big analytic queries from getting in the way of the small/fast queries. In the end the system should have enough performance so that very little query backlog ever exists.

Claims of being able to run 100s of queries at the same time is a straw man because it misses the point entirely. I don’t care if my data warehouse only runs 1 query at a time. As long as it manages to complete all of the queries fast enough to satisfy all of the SLAs everyone will be happy.

One of the users they gave me was a US-only company. So I think pretty much all the named users are probably at their desks at the same time.

But yes, we’re talking about named users.

Based on your most recent comment is seems though I was mislead by your (or Netezza’s) wording of “simultaneous users”. Given your clarification, “simultaneous users” is probably not the appropriate terminology. I would say “named users” would be much more appropriate as simultaneous users insinuates users are simultaneous doing something, thus the explanation of my comments. As you mentioned, what is meant is how many users have access to the platform, not how many users are actively using it at any one point in time.

I’m sorry. Who said anything about concurrent log-ins and the like? I’m referring to the number of human beings who have access to analytics against the same database at the same time.