Greenplum Chorus and Greenplum 4.0
Greenplum is making two product announcements this morning. Greenplum 4.0 is a revision of the core Greenplum database technology. In addition, Greenplum is announcing Greenplum Chorus, which is the first product release instantiating last year’s EDC (Enterprise Data Cloud) vision statement and marketing campaign.
Greenplum 4.0 highlights and related observations include: Read more
XtremeData update
I talked with Geno Valente of XtremeData tonight. Highlights included:
- XtremeData still hasn’t sold any dbX stuff (they’ve had a side business in generic FPGA-based boards paying the bills for years). Well, there may have been some paid POCs (proofs of concept) or something, but real sales haven’t come through yet.
- XtremeData does have three prospects who have said “Yes”, and expects one order to come through this month.
- XtremeData continues to believe it shines when:
- Data models are complex
- In particular, there are complex joins
- In particular, two large tables have to be joined with each other, under circumstances where no product can avoid doing vast data redistribution
- XtremeData insists that all the nice things Bill Inmon – including in webinars — has said about it has not been for pay or other similar business compensation. That’s quite unusual.
- XtremeData is coming out with a new product, codenamed the Personal Data Warehouse (PDW), which:
- Is ready to go into beta test
- Should be launched in a month and a half or so
- Will have a different name when it is launched
Naming aside, Read more
A question on MDX performance
An enterprise user wrote in with a question that boils down to:
What are reasonable MDX performance expectations?
MDX doesn’t come up in my life very much, and I don’t have much intuition about it. E.g., I don’t know whether one can slap an MDX-to-SQL converter on top of a fast analytic RDBMS and go to town. What’s more, I’m heading off on vacation and don’t feel like researching the matter myself in the immediate future. 
So here’s the long form of the question. Any thoughts?
I have a general question on assessing the performance of an OLAP technology using a set of MDX queries. I would be interested to know if there are any benchmark MDX performance tests/results comparing different OLAP technologies (which may be based on different underlying DBMS’s if appropriate) on similar hardware setup, or even comparisons of complete appliance solutions. More generally, I want to determine what performance limits I could reasonably expect on what I think are fairly standard servers.
In my own work, I have set up a star schema model centered on a Fact table of 100 million rows (approx 60 columns), with dimensions ranging in cardinality from 5 to 10,000. In ad hoc analytics, is it expected that any query against such a dataset should return a result within a minute or two (i.e. before a user gets impatient), regardless of whether that query returns 100 cells or 50,000 cells (without relying on any aggregate table or caching mechanism)? Or is that level of performance only expected with a high end massively parallel software/hardware solution? The server specs I’m testing with are: 32-bit 4 core, 4GB RAM, 7.2k RPM SATA drive, running Windows Server 2003; 64-bit 8 core, 32GB RAM, 3 Gb/s SAS drive, running Windows Server 2003 (x64).
I realise that caching of query results and pre-aggregation mechanisms can significantly improve performance, but I’m coming from the viewpoint that in purely exploratory analytics, it is not possible to have all combinations of dimensions calculated in advance, in addition to being maintained.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehousing, MOLAP | 16 Comments |
Facts and rumors
- Vertica is putting out a press release today touting its 100th customer, and talking of triple digit growth last year.
- Multiple sources have told me that the DATAllegro system is being thrown out of Dell, so evidently Dell is telling this to one and all. If that goes through, this would presumably leave TEOCO as DATAllegro’s single happy customer. (I haven’t checked with Microsoft for its view.)
- A rumor has it that Infiniband technology vendor Voltaire, Ltd. privately claims triple-digit sales of switches for Exadata 1 (I think that one would be one switch per Exadata installation, not per rack). Based just on a quick glance, this is far from confirmed by Voltaire’s earnings conference call transcripts or SEC filings. However, the most recent transcript does seem to indicate Voltaire got multiple Exadata deals in the telecommunications sector, and suggests some Exadata penetration in other sectors as well.
- I was told of a classified-agency user that has >1 petabyte of data on Exadata 1 and 600 terabytes or so on Netezza. My not-obviously-biased source says the agency is distinctly happier with Netezza than Exadata.
- Like ParAccel, Oracle just got dinged for TPC-related misbehavior.
- Rumor has it that Sun has no intention of helping ParAccel rerun its withdrawn TPC-H benchmark.
- ParAccel has withdrawn the claim from its home page to be the “CERTIFIED” price-performance leader. This seems to confirm that the claim was a reference to the TPC-H. In my opinion, that was a gross misrepresentation of what the TPC-H shows.
XtremeData announces its DBx data warehouse appliance
XtremeData is announcing its DBx data warehouse appliance today. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Pricing, XtremeData | 34 Comments |
While I’m venting about benchmarks
Late last year, Vertica made hoo-hah about what it called a world-record data warehouse load speed benchmark. I wrote at the time that this showed Vertica wasn’t painfully slow at loading, always a concern with column stores. But otherwise I mocked the idea that there was something useful to be learned from the whole exercise.
Well, guess what? In a throwaway line in a comment on Daniel Abadi’s blog, Barry Zane of ParAccel pointed out
we posted a load rate of almost 9TB/hour, which is, of course record breaking on its own
Quite right.
I hope the nonsense stops there, but I’m not optimistic …
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Vertica Systems | Leave a Comment |
Daniel Abadi has a theory about ParAccel
When I was at SIGMOD last week, ParAccel and its SIGMOD talk were mentioned several times, always in puzzled and at least slightly unflattering terms. (Typical comment: “Why did they present a paper about that? We were doing the same thing in our company years ago.”) That doesn’t prove much per se, since most of the mentions were by competitors and/or Vertica-affiliated academics, and since my own unflattering ParAccel-related comments were rather fresh at the time.
But now Daniel Abadi has done a brilliant, detailed, speculative analysis of ParAccel’s publications. Here’s the meat, emphasis mine: Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, ParAccel, Theory and architecture | 30 Comments |
The TPC-H schema
Would anybody recommend in real life running the TPC-H schema for that data? (I.e., fully normalized, no materialized views.) If so — why????
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehousing | 13 Comments |
Notes on columnar/TPC-H compression
I was chatting with Omer Trajman of Vertica, and he said that a 70% compression figure for ParAccel’s recent TPC-H filing sounded about right.* When I noted that seemed kind of low, Omer pointed out that TPC-H data is pseudo-random, while real-life data has much more correlation among the values in different columns. E.g., in retail, a customer is likely to consistently shop at the same stores and to put similar items into his shopping basket).
*Omer was involved in Vertica’s TPC-H-data-based load speed benchmark, and is Vertica’s representative to the TPC.
But why does this matter? After all, Vertica compresses one column at a time (unlike, say, Clearpace). Well, the reason is that Vertica — like other column stores — wants to store different columns in the same row order, for obvious benefits in both reading and writing. So, for example, if all the rows that include Gotham City are grouped sequentially, then all the rows mentioning Bruce Wayne are likely to be near each other as well, while none of the rows that mention Clark Kent will be mixed in.
And when a set of consecutive entries has low cardinality, it’s easier to get high levels of compression.
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Vertica Systems | Leave a Comment |
ParAccel pricing
As I noted in connection with ParAccel’s recent TPC-H filing, I think the whole exercise is basically an expensive joke. But one slightly useful spin-off is that ParAccel disclosed pricing. Specifically, ParAccel’s stated price in the disclosure document is:
- $100,000/TB license fee (user data). That’s like Vertica, although I don’t know whether ParAccel emulates Vertica’s policy of making test and development licenses free.
- 57% quantity discount at 30 terabytes. That’s not surprising.
- 1% annual maintenance fee (applied to the discounted price). That’s astounding.
Last year ParAccel quoted prices of $100,000/TB or $50,000/server. The latter figure would seem to have led to lower numbers on the benchmark configuration, so perhaps it’s no longer an option on ParAccel’s price list.
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehousing, ParAccel, Pricing | 3 Comments |