Analytic technologies
Discussion of technologies related to information query and analysis. Related subjects include:
- Business intelligence
- Data warehousing
- (in Text Technologies) Text mining
- (in The Monash Report) Data mining
- (in The Monash Report) General issues in analytic technology
Vertica offers some more numbers
Eric Lai interviewed Dave Menninger of Vertica. Highlights included:
- $20 million in trailing revenue. Removing a single multi-million-dollar deal from the list, that’s a few hundred thousand dollars each for 50ish customers. At $100K or so per terabyte, that’s an average of several terabytes of user data each, or more depending on what you assume about discounting.
- Dave used a figure of $100K per terabyte of user data, down from the $150K Vertica has previously used.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
Teradata Virtual Storage
One of the big features of Teradata 13.0, announced this week (Edit: and to be shipped some time in 2009), is Teradata Virtual Storage, which sounds pretty cool. So far as I can tell, Teradata Virtual Storage has two major aspects, namely: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Storage, Teradata | 3 Comments |
Teradata Geospatial, and datatype extensibility in general
As part of it’s 13.0 release this week, Teradata is productizing its geospatial datatype, which previously was just a downloadable library. (Edit: More precisely, Teradata announced 13.0, which will actually be shipped some time in 2009.) What Teradata Geospatial now amounts to is:
- User-defined functions (UDF) written by Teradata (this is the part that existed before).
- (Possibly new) Enhanced implementations of the Teradata geospatial UDFs, for better performance.
- (Definitely new) Optimizer awareness of the Teradata geospatial UDFs.
Teradata also intends in the future to implement actual geospatial indexing; candidates include r-trees and tesselation.
Hearing this was a good wake-up call for me, because in the past I’ve conflated two issues on datatype extensibility, namely:
- Whether the query executer uses a special access method (i.e., index type) for the datatype
- Whether the optimizer is aware of the datatypes.
But as Teradata just pointed out, those two issues can indeed be separated from each other.
| Categories: Data types, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Teradata | 1 Comment |
Quick guide to Teradata’s announcements this week
The Teradata Partners (i.e., user) conference is this week. So there have been lots of press releases, some presentations, lots of meetings, and so on. A lot of Teradata’s messaging is in flux, as it moves fairly rapidly to correct what I believe have been some deficiencies in the past. One confusing result is that there was very little prebriefing about the actual announcement details, and we’re all scrambling to figure out what’s up.
Teradata does a good job of collecting its press releases at one URL. So without linking to most of them individually, let me jump in to an overview of Teradata news this week (whether or not in actual press release format): Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Teradata | 9 Comments |
A data warehouse pricing complication: Software vs. appliances
Juan Loaiza of Oracle disagrees with a number of my opinions. We plan to talk about some of that when I visit on Thursday, after Teradata Partners. 🙂 But I’d like to throw one of his ideas out there right now. Juan contends that comparisons of Oracle Exadata pricing are apt to be misleading because — among other reasons — Oracle licenses can be reused on other hardware, in ways that appliance software can not. (The same reasoning would of course apply to almost everybody else except Teradata and Netezza.) Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Patrick Walravens’ SAP/Teradata speculation doesn’t make much sense
A persistent analyst named Patrick Walravens keeps speculating about an SAP acquisition of Teradata. So far as I can tell, Walravens is the sole source of this rumor, evidently because he actually thinks the combination would make some kind of business sense.
An example of the “logic” behind this theory is:
Mr. Walravens’s latest evidence pointing to such a move stems from the expected departure of a SAP executive who had been running the company’s NetWeaver software line, which includes a data warehouse package.
At a guess, Walravens is saying that Teradata’s products and SAP’s BI Accelerator somehow substitute for each other in the marketplace. If you believe that comparison, I’d like to sell you a railroad locomotive made by Jaguar. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, SAP AG, Teradata | 5 Comments |
Aster Data on online marketing data warehousing
Aster Data’s blog is getting to be like Vertica’s, in that I find myself recommending a large fraction of its posts.
The virtue of the latest one is that it strings together several customer examples in related areas of online marketing (which is pretty much the only sector Aster has so far sold into). I’ve tended to overgeneralize a bit, and use terms like “web analytics” or “clickstream analysis” even when they don’t wholly apply. The Aster post is a good antidote to that.
| Categories: Application areas, Aster Data, Data warehousing, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
Multiple approaches to memory-centric analytics
Memory-centric analytic processing is in the spotlight.
- Microsoft’s big analytics announcement for the week (one of them, anyway), is “Gemini,” which evidently amounts to some kind of in-memory, cube-based analytics, but with columns rather than true cubes as the in-memory data structure.
- That sounds at lot like SAP’s BI Accelerator, which is a way to manifest SAP InfoCubes in-memory in a columnar architecture.
- QlikTech is going gangbusters with memory-centric business intelligence.
- IBM/Cognos’ Applix, which has a rather unique approach to memory-centric cubes, has never lived up to its potential. But now people are being reminded it exists.
- Exasol has made some sales with a highly memory-centric approach to data warehousing. Kognitio’s story is somewhat disk/RAM hybrid (disk is certainly involved, but the best parts of the technology deal with what happens once the data gets into RAM).
- Most of what the CEP (Complex Event Processing, aka event/stream processing) industry does is memory-centric analytics, both via tight integration with operational apps seems and for conventional BI.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Memory-centric data management, Microsoft and SQL*Server | 3 Comments |
Advance sound bites on the Microsoft/DATAllegro announcement
Microsoft said they’d prebrief me on at least the DATAllegro part of tomorrow’s SQL Server announcements, but that didn’t turn out to happen (at least as of 9 pm Eastern time Sunday night). An embargoed press release did just arrive, but it’s so concise and high-level as to contain almost nothing of interest.
So I might as well post sound bites in advance. Here goes:
- With the DATAllegro acquisition, Microsoft leapfrogged Oracle. But with Exadata, Oracle leapfrogged Microsoft back. Exadata is actually shipping.
- There’s no assurance that the first DATAllegro/Microsoft release will inherit SQL Server’s level of concurrency. After all, DATAllegro/Ingres wasn’t as concurrent as plain Ingres.
- Porting DATAllegro from Ingres to SQL Server is likely to be straightforward. If they screw up it will be because they tried to do too much else at the same time, not because the basic port failed.
- Porting DATAllegro from Linux to Windows should also be OK. DATAllegro doesn’t stress the operating system in the areas where Windows remains weak.
- Earlier this year, DATAllegro had exactly one customer known to be in production, but I’ve spoken with that one. It’s TEOCO, which has a multi-hundred terabyte DATAllegro installation. TEOCO is a very price-oriented buyer.
- DATAllegro reports that two more customers are in production with large systems now. Neither of those is believed by industry sources to be especially in love with DATAllegro. Otherwise, nobody seems able and willing to identify other DATAllegro customers.
I’m going to be pretty busy Monday anyway. Linda is having a bit of oral surgery. And if I get back from that in time, I have calls set up with a couple of clients.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Microsoft and SQL*Server | 3 Comments |
History, focus, and technology of HP Neoview
On the basis of market impact to date, HP Neoview is just another data warehouse market participant – a dozen sales or so, a few systems in production, some evidence that it can handle 100 TB+ workloads, and so on. But HP’s BI Group CTO Greg Battas thinks Neoview is destined for greater things, because: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, HP and Neoview | 12 Comments |