Teradata
Analysis of data warehousing giant Teradata. Related subjects include:
Cloudera Hadoop strategy and usage notes
When we scheduled a call to talk about Sentry, Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski and I found time to discuss other stuff as well. One interesting part of our discussion was around the processing “frameworks” Cloudera sees as most important.
- The four biggies are:
- MapReduce. Duh.
- SQL, specifically Impala. This is as opposed to the uneasy Hive/MapReduce layering.
- Search.
- “Math” , which seems to mainly be through partnerships with SAS and Revolution Analytics. I don’t know a lot about how these work, but I presume they bypass MapReduce, in which case I could imagine them greatly outperforming Mahout.
- Stream processing (Storm) is next in line.
- Graph — e.g. Giraph — rises to at least the proof-of-concept level. Again, the hope would be that this well outperforms graph-on-MapReduce.
- Charles is also seeing at least POC interest in Spark.
- But MPI (Message Passing Interface) on Hadoop isn’t going anywhere fast, except to the extent it’s baked into SAS or other “math” frameworks. Generic MPI use cases evidently turn out to be a bad fit for Hadoop, due to factors such as:
- Low data volumes.
- Latencies in various parts of the system
HBase was artificially omitted from this “frameworks” discussion because Cloudera sees it as a little bit more of a “storage” system than a processing one.
Another good subject was offloading work to Hadoop, in a couple different senses of “offload”: Read more
Hortonworks business notes
Hortonworks did a business-oriented round of outreach, talking with at least Derrick Harris and me. Notes from my call — for which Rob Bearden didn’t bother showing up — include, in no particular order:
- Hortonworks denies advanced acquisition discussions with either Microsoft and Intel. Of course, that doesn’t exactly contradict the widespread story of Intel having made an acquisition offer. Edit: I have subsequently heard, very credibly, that the denial was untrue.
- As vendors usually do, Hortonworks denies the extreme forms of Cloudera’s suggestion that Hortonworks competitive wins relate to price slashing. But Hortonworks does believe that its license fees often wind up being lower than Cloudera’s, due especially to Hortonworks offering few extra-charge items than Cloudera.
- Hortonworks used a figure of ~75 subscription customers. Edit: That figure turns out in retrospect to have been inflated. This does not include OEM sales through, for example, Teradata, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace. However, that does include …
- … a small number of installations hosted in the cloud — e.g. ~2 on Amazon Web Services — or otherwise remotely. Also, testing in the cloud seems to be fairly frequent, and the cloud can also be a source of data ingested into Hadoop.
- Since Hortonworks a couple of times made it seem that Rackspace was an important partner, behind only Teradata and Microsoft, I finally asked why. Answers boiled down to a Rackspace Hadoop-as-a-service offering, plus joint work to improve Hadoop-on-OpenStack.
- Other Hortonworks reseller partners seem more important in terms of helping customers consume HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform), rather than for actually doing Hortonworks’ selling for it. (This is unsurprising — channel sales rarely are a path to success for a product that is also appropriately sold by a direct force.)
- Hortonworks listed its major industry sectors as:
- Web and retailing, which it identifies as one thing.
- Media.
- Telecommunications.
- Health care (various subsectors).
- Financial services, which it called “competitive” in the kind of tone that usually signifies “we lose a lot more than we win, and would love to change that”.
In Hortonworks’ view, Hadoop adopters typically start with a specific use case around a new type of data, such as clickstream, sensor, server log, geolocation, or social. Read more
Hortonworks, Hadoop, Stinger and Hive
I chatted yesterday with the Hortonworks gang. The main subject was Hortonworks’ approach to SQL-on-Hadoop — commonly called Stinger — but at my request we cycled through a bunch of other topics as well. Company-specific notes include:
- Hortonworks founder J. Eric “Eric14” Baldeschwieler is no longer at Hortonworks, although I imagine he stays closely in touch. What he’s doing next is unspecified, except by the general phrase “his own thing”. (Derrick Harris has more on Eric’s departure.)
- John Kreisa still is at Hortonworks, just not as marketing VP. Think instead of partnerships and projects.
- ~250 employees.
- ~70-75 subscription customers.
Our deployment and use case discussions were a little confused, because a key part of Hortonworks’ strategy is to support and encourage the idea of combining use cases and workloads on a single cluster. But I did hear:
- 10ish nodes for a typical starting cluster.
- 100ish nodes for a typical “data lake” committed adoption.
- Teradata UDA (Unified Data Architecture)* customers sometimes (typically?) jumping straight to a data lake scenario.
- A few users in the 10s of 1000s of nodes. (Obviously Yahoo is one.)
- HBase used in >50% of installations.
- Hive probably even more than that.
- Hortonworks is seeing a fair amount of interest in Windows Hadoop deployments.
*By the way — Teradata seems serious about pushing the UDA as a core message.
Ecosystem notes, in Hortonworks’ perception, included:
- Cloudera is obviously Hortonworks’ biggest distro competitor. Next is IBM, presumably in its blue-forever installed base. MapR is barely on the radar screen; Pivotal’s likely rise hasn’t yet hit sales reports.
- Hortonworks evidently sees a lot of MicroStrategy and Tableau, and some Platfora and Datameer, the latter two at around the same level of interest.
- Accumulo is a big deal in the Federal government, and has gotten a few health care wins as well. Its success is all about security. (Note: That’s all consistent with what I hear elsewhere.)
I also asked specifically about OpenStack. Hortonworks is a member of the OpenStack project, contributes nontrivially to Swift and other subprojects, and sees Rackspace as an important partner. But despite all that, I think strong Hadoop/OpenStack integration is something for the indefinite future.
Hortonworks’ views about Hadoop 2.0 start from the premise that its goal is to support running a multitude of workloads on a single cluster. (See, for example, what I previously posted about Tez and YARN.) Timing notes for Hadoop 2.0 include:
- It’s been in preview/release candidate/commercial beta mode for weeks.
- Q3 is the goal; H2 is the emphatic goal.
- Yahoo’s been in production with YARN >8 months, and has no MapReduce 1 clusters left. (Yahoo has >35,000 Hadoop nodes.)
- The last months of delays have been mainly about sprucing up various APIs and protocols, which may need to serve for a similar multi-year period as Hadoop 1’s have. But there also was some YARN stabilization into May.
Frankly, I think Cloudera’s earlier and necessarily incremental Hadoop 2 rollout was a better choice than Hortonworks’ later big bang, even though the core-mission aspect of Hadoop 2.0 is what was least ready. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance, NameNode failover and so on were well worth having, and it’s more than a year between Cloudera starting supporting them and when Hortonworks is offering Hadoop 2.0.
Hortonworks’ approach to doing SQL-on-Hadoop can be summarized simply as “Make Hive into as good an analytic RDBMS as possible, all in open source”. Key elements include: Read more
The refactoring of everything
I’ll start with three observations:
- Computer systems can’t be entirely tightly coupled — nothing would ever get developed or tested.
- Computer systems can’t be entirely loosely coupled — nothing would ever get optimized, in performance and functionality alike.
- In an ongoing trend, there is and will be dramatic refactoring as to which connections wind up being loose or tight.
As written, that’s probably pretty obvious. Even so, it’s easy to forget just how pervasive the refactoring is and is likely to be. Let’s survey some examples first, and then speculate about consequences. Read more
Notes on Teradata systems
Teradata is announcing its new high-end systems, the Teradata 6700 series. Notes on that include:
- Teradata tends to get 35-55% (roughly speaking) annual performance improvements, as measured by its internal blended measure Tperf. A big part of this is exploiting new-generation Intel processors.
- This year the figure is around 40%.
- The 6700 is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge.
- Teradata previously told me that Ivy Bridge — the next one after Sandy Bridge — could offer a performance “discontinuity”. So, while this is just a guess, I expect that next year’s Teradata performance improvement will beat this year’s.
- Teradata has now largely switched over to InfiniBand.
Teradata is also talking about data integration and best-of-breed systems, with buzzwords such as:
- Teradata Unified Data Architecture.
- Fabric-based computing, even though this isn’t really about storage.
- Teradata SQL-H.
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Pricing, SAS Institute, Teradata | 3 Comments |
Teradata SQL-H
As vendors so often do, Teradata has caused itself some naming confusion. SQL-H was introduced as a facility of Teradata Aster, to complement SQL-MR.* But while SQL-MR is in essence a set of SQL extensions, SQL-H is not. Rather, SQL-H is a transparency interface that makes Hadoop data responsive to the same code that would work on Teradata Aster …
*Speaking of confusion — Teradata Aster seems to use the spellings SQL/MR and SQL-MR interchangeably.
… except that now there’s also a SQL-H for regular Teradata systems as well. While it has the same general features and benefits as SQL-H for Teradata Aster, the details are different, since the underlying systems are.
I hope that’s clear. 🙂
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability, Hadoop, SQL/Hadoop integration, Teradata | 2 Comments |
DBMS development and other subjects
The cardinal rules of DBMS development
Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars.
That’s if things go extremely well.
Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1.
In particular:
- Concurrent workloads benchmarked in the lab are poor predictors of concurrent performance in real life.
- Mixed workload management is harder than you’re assuming it is.
- Those minor edge cases in which your Version 1 product works poorly aren’t minor after all.
DBMS with Hadoop underpinnings …
… aren’t exceptions to the cardinal rules of DBMS development. That applies to Impala (Cloudera), Stinger (Hortonworks), and Hadapt, among others. Fortunately, the relevant vendors seem to be well aware of this fact. Read more
Key questions when selecting an analytic RDBMS
I recently complained that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS conflates many use cases into one set of rankings. So perhaps now would be a good time to offer some thoughts on how to tell use cases apart. Assuming you know that you really want to manage your analytic database with a relational DBMS, the first questions you ask yourself could be:
- How big is your database? How big is your budget?
- How do you feel about appliances?
- How do you feel about the cloud?
- What are the size and shape of your workload?
- How fresh does the data need to be?
Let’s drill down. Read more
Comments on Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — evaluations
To my taste, the most glaring mis-rankings in the 2012/2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management are that it is too positive on Kognitio and too negative on Infobright. Secondarily, it is too negative on HP Vertica, and too positive on ParAccel and Actian/VectorWise. So let’s consider those vendors first.
Gartner seems confused about Kognitio’s products and history alike.
- Gartner calls Kognitio an “in-memory” DBMS, which is not accurate.
- Gartner doesn’t remark on Kognitio’s worst-in-class* compression.
- Gartner gives Kognitio oddly high marks for a late, me-too Hadoop integration strategy.
- Gartner writes as if Kognitio’s next attempt at the US market will be the first one, which is not the case.
- Gartner says that Kognitio pioneered data warehouse SaaS (Software as a Service), which actually has existed since the pre-relational 1970s.
Gartner is correct, however, to note that Kognitio doesn’t sell much stuff overall.
* non-existent
In the cases of HP Vertica, Infobright, ParAccel, and Actian/VectorWise, the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management’s facts are fairly accurate, but I dispute Gartner’s evaluation. When it comes to Vertica: Read more
Editing code is easier than writing it
I’ve hacked both the PHP and CSS that drive this website. But if I had to write PHP or CSS from scratch, I literally wouldn’t know how to begin.
Something similar, I suspect, is broadly true of “business analysts.” I don’t know how somebody can be a competent business analyst without being able to generate, read, and edit SQL. (Or some comparable language; e.g., there surely are business analysts who only know MDX.) I would hope they could write basic SELECT statements as well.
But does that mean business analysts are comfortable with the fancy-schmantzy extended SQL that the analytic platform vendors offer them? I would assume that many are but many others are not. And thus I advised such a vendor recently to offer sample code, and lots of it — dozens or hundreds of isolated SQL statements, each of which does a specific task.* A business analyst could reasonably be expected to edit any of those to point them his own actual databases, even though he can’t necessarily be expected to easily write such statements from scratch. Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Teradata | 3 Comments |