DATAllegro

Analysis of data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro and its products. Related subjects include:

August 14, 2008

Patent nonsense in the data warehouse DBMS market

There are two recent patent lawsuits in the data warehouse DBMS market. In one, Sybase is suing Vertica. In another, an individual named Cary Jardin (techie founder of XPrime, a sort of predecessor company to ParAccel) is suing DATAllegro. Naturally, there’s press coverage of the DATAllegro case, due in part to its surely non-coincidental timing right after the Microsoft acquisition was announced and in part to a vigorous PR campaign around it. And the Sybase case so excited a troll who calls himself Bill Walters that he posted identical references to it on about 12 different threads in this blog, as well as to a variety of Vertica-related articles in the online trade press. But I think it’s very unlikely that any of these cases turn out to much matter. Read more

July 25, 2008

Further thoughts on DATAllegro/Microsoft

My first, biggest thought about DATAllegro’s acquisition by Microsoft is “Why the ____ did it have to happen while I was trying to relax on my annual Cayman vacation???” Not coincidentally, I don’t plan to neatly cross-link all my posts and so on about DATAllegro/Microsoft until I get back to Acton this weekend.

One linking screwup is that I previously forgot to mention that — in addition to the numerous posts here — I also made several DATAllegro/Microsoft-related posts on my Network World blog A World of Bytes.  They include: Read more

July 24, 2008

Other early coverage of Microsoft/DATAllegro

July 24, 2008

DATAllegro could provide Microsoft with a true enterprise data warehouse sooner than you think

Jim Ericson of DM Review emailed the excellent questions:

Does DATAllegro give MSFT full-service high end data warehousing capability? If not, what is missing?

My quick answers are:

Both are largely a matter of product maturity, and as a young company DATAllegro isn’t quite there yet.

That said, integration with Microsoft SQL Server is apt to be a big help in addressing both issues. Read more

July 24, 2008

How will Oracle save its data warehouse business?

By acquiring DATAllegro, Microsoft has seriously leapfrogged Oracle in data warehouse technology. All doubts about maturity and versatility notwithstanding, DATAllegro has a 10X or better size advantage (actually, I think it’s more like 20-40X) versus Oracle in warehouses its technology can straightforwardly handle. Oracle cannot afford to let this move go unanswered.

It’s of course possible that Oracle has been successfully developing comparable data warehouse technology internally. But it’s unlikely. Oracle hasn’t done anything that radical, internally and successfully, for about 15 years, RAC (Real Application Clusters) excepted. (I.e., since the object/relational extensibility framework started in Release 7.) So in all likelihood, the answer will come via acquisition. I think there are four candidates that make the most sense: Teradata, Vertica, ParAccel, and Greenplum. Kognitio (controlled by former Oracle honcho Geoff Squire) might be in the mix as well. Netezza is probably a non-starter because of its hardware-centric strategy.

Here’s why I’m emphasizing Teradata, Vertica, ParAccel, and Greenplum: Read more

July 24, 2008

Microsoft is buying DATAllegro

I’ve long argued that:

Microsoft has now validated my claim by agreeing to buy DATAllegro. As you probably know, we’ve been covering DATAllegro extensively, as per the links listed below.

Basic deal highlights include: Read more

July 3, 2008

Three cartoons from DATAllegro

DATAllegro Cartoon demanding
DATAllegro Cartoon forever
DATAllegro Cartoon gerbils

Related links:

May 24, 2008

DATAllegro on compression

DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost has been blogging quite a bit recently (and not before time!). A couple of his posts have touched on compression. In one he gave actual numbers for compression, namely:

DATAllegro compresses between 2:1 and 6:1 depending on the content of the rows, whereas column-oriented systems claim 4:1 to 10:1.

In another recent post, Stuart touched on architecture, saying:

Due to the way our compression code works, DATAllegro’s current products are optimized for performance under heavy concurrency. The end result is that we don’t use the full power of the platform when running one query at a time.

Read more

May 23, 2008

Data warehouse appliance power user TEOCO

If you had to name super-high-end users of data warehouse technology, your list might start with a few retailers, credit data processors, and telcos, plus the US intelligence establishment. Well, it turns out that TEOCO runs outsourced data warehouses for several of the top US telcos, making it one of the top data warehouse technology users around.

A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating chat with John Devolites of TEOCO. Highlights included:

April 21, 2008

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:

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 …

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