Data warehousing
Analysis of issues in data warehousing, with extensive coverage of database management systems and data warehouse appliances that are optimized to query large volumes of data. Related subjects include:
Introduction to Aster Data and nCluster
I’ve been writing a lot about Greenplum since a recent visit. But on the same trip I met with Aster Data, and have talked with them further since. Let me now redress the balance and outline some highlights of the Aster Data story.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Parallelization, Specific users | 4 Comments |
Estimating user data vs. spinning disk
There’s a lot of confusion about how to measure data warehouse database size. Major complicating factors include:
- Indexes and temporary working space. That’s what I emphasized a couple of years ago in my post about Expansion Ratios.
- Compression. I write about database compression a lot.
- Disk redundancy. I usually gloss over that one, but I’ll try to make amends in this post.
- Replication other than that which is primarily designed for redundancy. I usually gloss over that one too, and I think it’s safe to continue doing so. That’s because data warehouse replication – at least in most of the system architectures I know of – generally divides into three categories:
- a lot like redundancy
- a lot like an index
- only a minor issue (e.g., when small fact tables are replicated across each node of an MPP cluster)
Greenplum’s CTO Luke Lonergan recently walked me through the general disk usage arithmetic for Greenplum’s most common configuration (Sun Thors*, configured to Raid 10). I found it pretty interesting, and a good guide to factors that also affect other systems, from other vendors.
Yes, but what are the Very Biggest benefits of MapReduce?
On behalf of On-Demand Enterprise, nee’ Grid Today, Dennis Barker asked me to clarify the most important benefits, features, etc. to various constituencies (business users, programmers, DBAs, etc.) of the Greenplum and Aster Data MapReduce announcements. Questions like that are hard to answer simply. Here’s why.
The core benefit of MapReduce is price/performance (because it allows the cost benefits of parallelization to be applied to analyses that are hard to parallelize otherwise). Large price/performance gains commonly mix together three kinds of benefits.
1. They let you do what you did before, for less money.
2. They let you do a better version of what you did before, for similar money.
3. They let you do new things that didn’t make economic sense before, but now do.
Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, MapReduce | Leave a Comment |
Are analytic DBMS vendors overcomplicating their interconnect architectures?
I don’t usually spend a lot of time researching Ethernet switches. But I do think a lot about high-end data warehousing, and as I noted back in July, networking performance is a big challenge there. Among the very-large-scale MPP data warehouse software vendors, Greenplum is unusual in that its interconnect of choice is (sufficiently many) cheap 1 gigabit Ethernet switches.
A recent Network World story suggested that Greenplum wasn’t alone in this preference; other people also feel that clusters of commodity 1 gigabit Ethernet switches can be superior to higher-performing ones. So I pinged CTO Luke Lonergan of Greenplum for more comment. His response, which I got permission to publish, was: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Parallelization | 4 Comments |
Sales figures for analytic DBMS
One of my clients asked how many new customers I thought were buying analytic DBMS each quarter. I don’t generally track such things, but hey — a client asked, so I did the best I could. And since I did the work, now I’ll share it generally. To wit:
Read more
Enterprises are buying multiple brands of analytic DBMS each
Over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of NDA discussions about analytic DBMS vendors’ specific customers. And so I’ve been acutely aware of something I already sort of knew — just as there was in prior generations of database management technology, there’s huge overlap among analytic DBMS vendors’ customer bases as well. As they always have, enterprises are investing in multiple different brands of DBMS, even in cases where those DBMS can do pretty much the same things.
For example:
- Many Teradata users are buying newer technology too. But they aren’t actually throwing out Teradata.
- The same sometimes applies to Netezza already. At least two Netezza references are also references for a rival vendor.
- One outfit is among the biggest customers for two different analytic DBMS vendors, neither of which is Teradata or Netezza.
- One corporation is using or deploying four different brands of analytic DBMS.
- TEOCO is a big user of both DATAllegro and Netezza.
Vertica’s paying customer count
In a recent Computerworld article, Andy Ellicott of Vertica was cited as saying Vertica has 50 paying customers total. That’s very much on par with Greenplum’s figure, leaving aside any questions of deal size. (Greenplum runs a number of databases much larger than Vertica’s biggest. However, I believe Greenplum also charges a lot less per terabyte of user data.)
Previous Vertica paying customer count figures include:
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Vertica Systems | 8 Comments |
Three approaches to parallelizing data transformation
Many MPP data warehousing vendors have told me their products are used for ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) instead of ETL (Extract/Transform/Load). I.e., needed data transformations are done on the MPP system, rather than on the — probably SMP — system the data comes from.* If the data transformation is being applied on a record-by-record basis, then it’s automatically fully parallelized. Even if the transforms are more complex, considerable parallel processing may still be going on.
*Or it’s some of each, at which point it’s called ETLT — I bet you can work out what that stands for.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, MapReduce, Parallelization, Pervasive Software | 8 Comments |
Why MapReduce matters to SQL data warehousing
Greenplum and Aster Data have both just announced the integration of MapReduce into their SQL MPP data warehouse products. So why do I think this could be a big deal? The short answer is “Because MapReduce offers dramatic performance gains in analytic application areas that still need great performance speed-up.” The long answer goes something like this.
The core ideas of MapReduce are: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, MapReduce, Parallelization | 24 Comments |
Greenplum’s single biggest customer
Greenplum offered a bit of clarification regarding the usage figures I posted last night. Everything on the list is in production, except that:
- One Greenplum customer is at 400 terabytes now, and upgrading to >1 petabyte “as we speak.”
- Greenplum’s other soon-to-be >1 petabyte customer isn’t in production yet. (Greenplum previously told me that customer was in the process of loading data right now.)