December 9, 2012

Amazon Redshift and its implications

Merv Adrian and Doug Henschen both reported more details about Amazon Redshift than I intend to; see also the comments on Doug’s article. I did talk with Rick Glick of ParAccel a bit about the project, and he noted:

“We didn’t want to do the deal on those terms” comments from other companies suggest ParAccel’s main financial take from the deal is an already-reported venture investment.

The cloud-related engineering was mainly around communications, e.g. strengthening error detection/correction to make up for the lack of dedicated switches. In general, Rick seemed more positive on running in the (Amazon) cloud than analytic RDBMS vendors have been in the past.

So who should and will use Amazon Redshift? For starters, I’d say:

Also — if Amazon Redshift is your analytic RDBMS, what’s the rest of your analytic environment?  I can think of three possibilities that could work pretty straightforwardly:

Anything else would seem hard to stitch together at this time.

Putting that together, I see three kinds of users for whom Amazon Redshift might make sense:

All three of those are “traditional” markets for new-generation analytic DBMS and data warehouse appliances, except that those DBMS are rarely put into production in the cloud. But for the most part, vendors have moved upscale — enterprise users, analytic platform features, etc. So the biggest threat from Amazon Redshift is to markets that other vendors have somewhat left behind.

So how should and will the analytic RDBMS industry respond? My thoughts on that begin:

Comments

6 Responses to “Amazon Redshift and its implications”

  1. ParAccel update | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on December 9th, 2012 12:00 pm

    […] connection with Amazon’s Redshift announcement, ParAccel reached out, and so I talked with them for the first time in a long while. At the highest […]

  2. Al DeLosSantos on December 11th, 2012 2:42 pm

    Hello Curt,

    Thanks for the continued education in the field of DBMS’. I just finished reviewing some of your prior posts on analytics:
    (http://www.softwarememories.com/2012/01/17/historical-notes-on-the-departmental-adoption-of-analytics/)
    Very good material. Do you happen to have any writings, opinions or recommendations on data governance in general?

    Regards,
    Al D.

  3. More on Actian/ParAccel/VectorWise/Versant/etc. | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on April 29th, 2013 7:51 am

    […] Amazon did a deal with ParAccel that amounted to: […]

  4. Things I keep needing to say | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on August 12th, 2013 2:46 am

    […] is claimed that there are a lot of Redshift users, I presume low-end […]

  5. Some stuff on my mind, September 28, 2014 | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on September 28th, 2014 8:21 pm

    […] hearing much more mention of Amazon Redshift than I used to. It seems to have a lot of traction as a simple and low-cost […]

  6. Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete? | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on August 31st, 2016 5:13 pm

    […] cloud affect all this? Mainly, it brings one more analytic RDBMS competitor into the mix, namely Amazon Redshift. Redshift is a simple system for doing analytic SQL over data that was in or headed to the Amazon […]

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