Database compression

Analysis of technology that compresses data within a database management system. Related subjects include:

January 15, 2010

There sure seem to be a lot of inaccuracies on ParAccel’s website

In what is actually an interesting post on database compression, ParAccel CTO Barry Zane threw in

Anyone who has met with us knows ParAccel shies away from hype.

But like many things ParAccel says, that is not true.

The latest whoppers came in the form of several customers ParAccel listed on its website who hadn’t actually bought ParAccel’s DBMS, nor even decided to do so. It is fairly common to to claim a customer win, then retract the claim due to lack of permission to disclose. But that’s not what happened in these cases. Based on emails helpfully shared by a ParAccel competitor competing in some of those accounts, it seems clear that ParAccel actually posted fabricated claims of customer wins. Read more

November 7, 2009

Calpont’s InfiniDB

Since its inception, Calpont has gone through multiple management teams, strategies, and investor groups. What it hadn’t done, ever, is actually shipped a product. Last week, however, Calpont introduced a free/open source DBMS, InfiniDB, with technical details somewhat reminiscent of what Calpont was promising last April. Highlights include:

Being on vacation, I’ll stop there for now. (If it weren’t for Tropical Storm/ depression Ida, I might not even be posting this much until I get back.)

October 18, 2009

Introduction to SenSage

I visited with SenSage on my two most recent trips to San Francisco. Both visits were, through no fault of SenSage’s, hasty. Still, I think I have enough of a handle on SenSage basics to be worth writing up.

General SenSage highlights include:

Read more

October 18, 2009

Kickfire capacity and pricing

Kickfire’s marketing communication efforts are still a work in progress. Kickfire did finally relax its secrecy about FPGA-vs.-custom-silicon – not coincidentally during Netezza’s recent publicity cycle. That wise choice helped Kickfire get some favorable attention recently for its technical and market strategy, e.g. from Daniel Abadi, Merv Adrian and, kicking things off — as it were — me. Weeks after a recent Kickfire product release, there’s finally a fairly accurate data sheet up, although there’s still one self-defeatingly misleading line I’ll comment on below. Pricing is a whole other area of confusion, although it seems that current list prices have been inadvertently* leaked in Merv’s post linked above, with only one inaccuracy that I can detect.**

*I gather from the company that they forgot to tell Merv pricing was NDA.

** Merv cited a price as “starting” that I believe to be top-of-the-line. No criticism of Merv is implied in that; Kickfire has not been very clear in communicating hard numbers.

All that said, if one takes Kickfire’s marketing statements literally, Kickfire list pricing is around $20-50K per terabyte for a few small, fixed, high-performance configurations. That’s all-in, for plug-and-play appliances. What’s more, that range is based on the actual published user data capacity numbers for various Kickfire models, which I think are low for several reasons:

October 14, 2009

Greenplum is going hybrid columnar as well

Over the past summer, Vertica, VectorWise, and Oracle all announced flavors of hybrid row/columnar storage. Now it’s Greenplum’s turn. Greenplum is actually offering true columnar storage, as opposed to Oracle’s PAX-like scheme — and also as opposed to the kind of Frankencolumn storage Daniel Abadi decries. For example, you don’t have to do a join to retrieve multiple columns; you just ask for them and there they are. Similarly, Greenplum doesn’t maintain explicit row IDs – whether in row-oriented or column-oriented append-only storage – relying instead on block-level header information. Read more

October 6, 2009

Oracle and Vertica on compression and other physical data layout features

In my recent post on Exadata pricing, I highlighted the importance of Oracle’s compression figures to the discussion, and the uncertainty about same. This led to a Twitter discussion featuring Greg Rahn* of Oracle and Dave Menninger and Omer Trajman of Vertica.  I also followed up with Omer on the phone. Read more

October 5, 2009

Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Summary of Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Analyzing Oracle Exadata pricing is always harder than one would first think. But I’ve finally gotten around to doing an Oracle Exadata 2 pricing spreadsheet. The main takeaways are:

Longer version

When Oracle introduced Exadata last year it was, well, expensive. Exadata 2 has now been announced, and it is significantly cheaper than Exadata 1 per terabyte of user data, based on:

Read more

September 21, 2009

Notes on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 white paper

The Oracle Database 11g Release 2 white paper I cited a couple of weeks ago has evidently been edited, given that a phrase I quoted last month is no longer to be found. Anyhow, here are some quotes from and comments on what evidently is the latest version. Read more

September 3, 2009

Oracle Exadata hybrid columnar compression

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 is out, and as usual I wasn’t briefed — perhaps because Oracle is more scared than its competitors are of hard questions, perhaps for some other reason entirely.*  Anyhow, Oracle Database 11 Release 2 contains an Exadata-only feature called hybrid columnar compression. The Oracle Database 11g Release 2 white paper says “data is grouped, ordered, and stored one column at a time.” But Kevin Closson clarifies:

The word hybrid is important.

Rows are still used. They are stored in an object called a Compression Unit. Compression Units can span multiple blocks. Like values are stored in the compression unit with metadata that maps back to the rows.

So, “hybrid” is the word. But, none of that matters as much as the effectiveness. This form of compression is extremely effective.

That sounds a whole lot like PAX. Specifically, in Oracle’s case I would guess “hybrid columnar compression” provides the compression benefits of column stores, but not column stores’ I/O benefits, and also not any kind of in-memory compression. Read more

August 25, 2009

Sybase IQ technical highlights

General highlights of the Sybase IQ technical story include:

Highlights of the Sybase IQ compression story include: Read more

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