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 update
Another TDWI conference approaches. Not coincidentally, I had another Vertica briefing. Primary subjects included some embargoed stuff, plus (at my instigation) outsourced data marts. But I also had the opportunity to follow up on a couple of points from February’s briefing, namely:
Vertica has about 35 paying customers. That doesn’t sound like a lot more than they had a quarter ago, but first quarters can be slow.
Vertica’s list price is $150K/terabyte of user data. That sounds very high versus the competition. On the other hand, if you do the math versus what they told me a few months ago — average initial selling price $250K or less, multi-terabyte sites — it’s obvious that discounting is rampant, so I wouldn’t actually assume that Vertica is a high-priced alternative.
Vertica does stress several reasons for thinking its TCO is competitive. First, with all that compression and performance, they think their hardware costs are very modest. Second, with the self-tuning, they think their DBA costs are modest too. Finally, they charge only for deployed data; the software that stores copies of data for development and test is free.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
Outsourced data marts
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read more
Truviso and EnterpriseDB blend event processing with ordinary database management
Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:
There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.
Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.
If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.
ParAccel pricing
I made a round of queries about data warehouse software or appliance pricing, and am posting the results as I get them. Earlier installments featured Teradata and Netezza. Now ParAccel is up.
ParAccel’s software license fees are actually very simple — $50K per server or $100K per terabyte, whichever is less. (If you’re wondering how the per-TB fee can ever be the smaller one, please recall that ParAccel offers a memory-centric approach to sub-TB databases.)
Details about how much data fits on a node are hard to come by, as is clarity about maintenance costs. Even so, pricing turns out to be one of the rare subjects on which ParAccel is more forthcoming than most competitors.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, ParAccel, Pricing | 3 Comments |
Yet another data warehouse database and appliance overview
For a recent project, it seemed best to recapitulate my thoughts on the overall data warehouse specialty DBMS and appliance marketplace. While what resulted is highly redundant with what I’ve posted in this blog before, I’m sharing anyway, in case somebody finds this integrated presentation more useful. The original is excerpted to remove confidential parts.
… This is a crowded market, with a lot of subsegments, and blurry, shifting borders among the subsegments.
… Everybody starts out selling consumer marketing and telecom call-detail-record apps. …
Oracle and similar products are optimized for updates above everything else. That is, short rows of data are banged into tables. The main indexing scheme is the “b-tree,” which is optimized for finding specific rows of data as needed, and also for being updated quickly in lockstep with updates to the data itself.
By way of contrast, an analytic DBMS is optimized for some or all of:
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Small numbers of bulk updates, not large numbers of single-row updates.
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Queries that may involve examining or returning lots of data, rather than finding single records on a pinpoint basis.
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Doing arithmetic calculations – commonly simple arithmetic, sorts, etc. — on the data.
Database and/or DBMS design techniques that have been applied to analytic uses include: Read more
DATAllegro finally has a blog
It took a lot of patient nagging, but DATAllegro finally has a blog. Based on the first post, I predict:
- DATAllegro’s blog will live up to CEO Stuart Frost’s talent for clear, interesting writing.
- Like a number of other vendor blogs — e.g., Netezza’s — DATAllegro’s will have infrequent but usually long posts.
The crunchiest part of the first post is probably
Another very important aspect of performance is ensuring sequential reads under a complex workload. Traditional databases do not do a good job in this area – even though some of the management tools might tell you that they are! What we typically see is that the combination of RAID arrays and intervening storage infrastructure conspires to break even large reads by the database into very small reads against each disk. The end result is that most large DW installations have very large arrays of expensive, high-speed disks behind them – and still suffer from poor performance.
I’ve pounded the table about sequential reads multiple times — including in a (DATAllegro-sponsored) white paper — but the point about misleading management tools is new to me.
Now if I could just get a production DATAllegro reference, I’d be completely happy …
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro | 6 Comments |
Netezza pricing
In connection with the announcement of the Teradata 2500, I asked some Teradata competitors about pricing. Netezza’s response amounted to “We don’t disclose list pricing, but our cheapest system handles about 3 1/4 TB and sells for under $200K.” So Netezza’s actual pricing is well below the list price of the Teradata 2500.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Teradata | 11 Comments |
Teradata introduces lower-cost appliances
After months of leaks, Teradata has unveiled its new lines of data warehouse appliances, raising the total number either from 1 to 3 (my view) or 0 to 2 (what you believe if you think Teradata wasn’t previously an appliance vendor). Most significant is the new Teradata 2500 series, meant to compete directly with the smaller data warehouse specialists. Highlights include:
- An oddly precise estimated capacity of “6.12 terabytes”/node (user data). This estimate is based on 30% compression, which is low by industry standards, and surely explains part of the price umbrella the Teradata 2500 is offering other vendors.
- $125K/TB of user data. Obviously, list pricing and actual pricing aren’t the same thing, and many vendors don’t even bother to disclose official price lists. But the Teradata 2500 seems more expensive than most smaller-vendor alternatives.
- Scalability up to 24 nodes (>140 TB).
- Full Teradata application-facing functionality. Some of Teradata’s rivals are still working on getting all of their certifications with tier-1 and tier-2 business intelligence tools. Teradata has a rich application ecosystem.
- What will be controversial performance, until customer-benchmark trends clearly emerge.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Pricing, Teradata | 6 Comments |
Kickfire kicks off
I chatted with Raj Cherabuddi and others on the Kickfire (formerly C2) team for over an hour on Monday, and now have a better sense of their story. There are some very basic questions I still don’t have answers to; I’ll fill those in when I can.
Highlights of what I have and haven’t figured out so far include:
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Kickfire’s technology has two main parts: A SQL co-processor chip and a MySQL storage engine.
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Kickfire makes a Type 0 appliance. If I understood correctly, it contains the chip, a couple of standard CPU cores, and 64 gigs of RAM. Or else it contains just the chip, and is meant to be hooked up to a 2U box with 64 gigs of RAM. I’m confused.
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The Kickfire box can handle up to 3 terabytes of user data. The disk required for that is 4-5 terabytes without redundancy, 2X with. Based on that formulation and other clues, I’m guessing Kickfire — unlike other appliance vendors — doesn’t build in storage itself.
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I don’t know whether the Kickfire chip is true custom silicon or an FPGA emulation.
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The essential idea of the chip is dataflow programming for SQL, with pipelining between operations. This eliminates the overhead of registers and context switching. I don’t know what the trade-offs are, if any.
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Kickfire’s database software is columnar, operating on compressed data even in RAM. In that, Kickfire’s story is most similar to Vertica’s, although I’m guessing Exasol may do something similar as well. Like Vertica, Kickfire uses multiple compression methods (they’re reluctant to give detail, but agreed it would be fair to say they use both something like dictionary/token and something like delta compression).
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Kickfire’s software is ACID-compliant. You can do incremental loads or trickle feeds. Bulk load speed is 100 Gb/hour. Kickfire’s solution for the traditional problem of updating column stores is called “snapshots.” Without giving details, they position that as similar to the Vertica solution.
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Like other MySQL storage engines, Kickfire inherits whatever data connectivity, stored procedure capabilities, user-defined functions ability, etc. that MySQL has.
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Kickfire has no paying customers, but does have a slide showing many logos of “prospects and beta customers.”
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Kickfire has no MPP capabilities at this time, but says adding those is “on the roadmap” and will be “easy.”
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Kickfire submitted a 100 Gb TPC-H result, in which it beat the previous leaders — Exasol, ParAccel, and Microsoft – on price-performance, and lagged only Exasol and ParAccel on absolute performance. Kickfire is extremely proud of this. Indeed, I don’t recall another vendor ascribing that much weight to them in the entire history of TPCs.* Kickfire seems unfazed by the fact that its result is for a system listed with a ship date 6 months in the future (I’m guessing that’s the latest the TPC will allow), while the other results are for systems available today.
*Somebody – perhaps adman extraordinaire Rick Bennett? — may want to check my memory on this, but I think Oracle’s famed “Gentlemen, start your snails” ad in the early 1990s was about PC World tests, not TPCs. Oracle also had an ad about WW1-style planes nosediving, but I don’t think those referenced TPCs either.
Kickfire is de-cloaking
Kickfire, the renamed C2, is doing one of those buzz-building rollouts in which they make sure the first word comes from people on their payroll golly-gee-whizzing. You can see those at Xarpb and Diamond Notes, as well as a forthcoming article in MySQL magazine. Farhan Mashraqi also appears to be involved. Kickfire is also sponsoring the MySQL user conference next week.
I plan to write more after I get some substance, but a few things seem clear:
1. Kickfire’s product is an appliance that functions as a MySQL storage engine.
2. There’s a custom chip involved.
3. Kickfire plans to throw around the “stream processing” buzzphrase a lot.
Now, “stream processing” means a lot of different things to different people. E.g., Netezza uses the phrase just because their FPGA throws away a lot of data before ever routing it to more conventional SQL processing. But pending a briefing, I’m guessing that Kickfire’s sense is similar to what underlies the case for using CEP in BI.
Edit: Here’s an update after an actual Kickfire briefing.