Teradata

Analysis of data warehousing giant Teradata. Related subjects include:

February 22, 2010

February 2010 data warehouse DBMS news roundup

February is usually a busy month for data warehouse DBMS product releases, product announcements, and other real or contrived data warehouse DBMS news, and it can get pretty confusing trying to keep those categories of “news” apart.*  This year is no exception, although several vendors – including Teradata and Netezza – are taking “rolling thunder” approaches, doing some of their announcements this month while holding others back for March or April.

*I probably have it worse than most people in that regard, because my clients run tentative feature lists and announcement schedules by me well in advance, which may get changed multiple times before the final dates roll around. I also occasionally miss some detail, if it wasn’t in a pre-briefing but gets added at the end.

Anyhow, the three big themes of this month’s announcements are probably:

Read more

February 22, 2010

TwinFin(i) – Netezza’s version of a parallel analytic platform

Much like Aster Data did in Aster 4.0 and now Aster 4.5, Netezza is announcing a general parallel big data analytic platform strategy. It is called Netezza TwinFin(i), it is a chargeable option for the Netezza TwinFin appliance, and many announced details are on the vague side, with Netezza promising more clarity at or before its Enzee Universe conference in June. At a high level, the Aster and Netezza approaches compare/contrast as follows: Read more

February 22, 2010

Aster Data nCluster 4.5

Like Vertica, Netezza, and Teradata, Aster is using this week to pre-announce a forthcoming product release, Aster Data nCluster 4.5. Aster is really hanging its identity on “Big Data Analytics” or some variant of that concept, and so the two major named parts of Aster nCluster 4.5 are:

And in other Aster news:

Aster Data Developer Express evidently does some cool stuff, like providing some sort of parallelism testing right on your desktop. It also generates lots of stub code, saving humans from the tedium of doing that. Useful, obviously.

But mainly, I want to write about the analytic packages. Read more

February 11, 2010

Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010

As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen

(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)

Read more

February 10, 2010

Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant

At intervals of little over a year, Gartner Group publishes a Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s 2009 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant — actually, January 2010 — is now out.* For many reasons, including those I noted in my comments on Gartner’s 2008 Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner quadrant pictures are a bad use of good research. Rather than rehash that this year, I’ll merely call out some points in the surrounding commentary that I find interesting or just plain strange. Read more

October 30, 2009

Aster Data 4.0 and the evolution of “advanced analytic(s) servers”

Since Linda and I are leaving on vacation in a few hours, Aster Data graciously gave me permission to morph its “12:01 am Monday, November 2” embargo into “late Friday night.”

Aster Data is officially announcing the 4.0 release of nCluster. There are two big pieces to this announcement:

In addition, Aster has matured nCluster in various ways, for example cleaning up a performance problem with single-row updates.

Highlights of the Aster “Data-Application Server” story include: Read more

October 27, 2009

Teradata’s nebulous cloud strategy

As the pun goes, Teradata’s cloud strategy is – well, it’s somewhat nebulous. More precisely, for the foreseeable future, Teradata’s cloud strategy is a collection of rather disjointed parts, including:

Teradata openly admits that its direction is heavily influenced by Oliver Ratzesberger at eBay. Like Teradata, Oliver and eBay favor virtual data marts over physical ones. That is, Oliver and eBay believe that the ideal scenario is that every piece of data is only stored once, in an integrated Teradata warehouse. But eBay believes and Teradata increasingly agrees that users need a great deal of control over their use of this data, including the ability to import additional data into private sandboxes, and join it to the warehouse data already there. Read more

October 25, 2009

Teradata hardware strategy and tactics

In my opinion, the most important takeaways about Teradata’s hardware strategy from the Teradata Partners conference last week are:

In addition, some non-SSD componentry tidbits from Carson Schmidt include:

Let’s get back now to SSDs, because over the next few years they’re the potential game-changer. Read more

October 25, 2009

Reports of perfectly-balanced hardware configurations are greatly exaggerated

Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:

What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.

October 19, 2009

This week at the Teradata Partners user conference

Teradata tells me that its press embargoes are ending at 9:00 this morning. Here are some highlights of what’s going on, although names, dates, and details will have to await conversations and press releases this week.

Next Page →

Feed including blog about database management, data warehousing, and business intelligence Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.