Vertica Systems

Analysis of columnar data warehouse DBMS vendor Vertica Systems. Related subjects include:

December 5, 2013

Vertica 7

It took me a bit of time, and an extra call with Vertica’s long-time R&D chief Shilpa Lawande, but I think I have a decent handle now on Vertica 7, code-named Crane. The two aspects of Vertica 7 I find most interesting are:

Other Vertica 7 enhancements include:

Overall, two recurring themes in our discussion were:

Read more

October 18, 2013

Entity-centric event series analytics

Much of modern analytic technology deals with what might be called an entity-centric sequence of events. For example:

Analytic questions are asked along the lines “Which sequences of events are most productive in terms of leading to the events we really desire?”, such as product sales. Another major area is sessionization, along with data preparation tasks that boil down to arranging data into meaningful event sequences in the first place.

A number of my clients are focused on such scenarios, including WibiData, Teradata Aster (e.g. via nPath), Platfora (in the imminent Platfora 3), and others. And so I get involved in naming exercises. The term entity-centric came along a while ago, because “user-centric” is too limiting. (E.g., the data may not be about a person, but rather specifically about the actions taken on her mobile device.) Now I’m adding the term event series to cover the whole scenario, rather than the “event sequence(s)” I might appear to have been hinting at above.

I decided on “event series” earlier this week, after noting that:  Read more

August 12, 2013

Things I keep needing to say

Some subjects just keep coming up. And so I keep saying things like:

Most generalizations about “Big Data” are false. “Big Data” is a horrific catch-all term, with many different meanings.

Most generalizations about Hadoop are false. Reasons include:

Hadoop won’t soon replace relational data warehouses, if indeed it ever does. SQL-on-Hadoop is still very immature. And you can’t replace data warehouses unless you have the power of SQL.

Note: SQL isn’t the only way to provide “the power of SQL”, but alternative approaches are just as immature.

Most generalizations about NoSQL are false. Different NoSQL products are … different. It’s not even accurate to say that all NoSQL systems lack SQL interfaces. (For example, SQL-on-Hadoop often includes SQL-on-HBase.)

Read more

July 2, 2013

Notes and comments, July 2, 2013

I’m not having a productive week, part of the reason being a hard drive crash that took out early drafts of what were to be last weekend’s blog posts. Now I’m operating from a laptop, rather than my preferred dual-monitor set-up. So please pardon me if I’m concise even by comparison to my usual standards.

*Basic and unavoidable ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) of course excepted.

**I could call that ABC (Always Be Comparing) or ABT (Always Be Testing), but they each sound like – well, like The Glove and the Lions.

June 10, 2013

Where things stand in US government surveillance

Edit: Please see the comment thread below for updates. Please also see a follow-on post about how the surveillance data is actually used.

US government surveillance has exploded into public consciousness since last Thursday. With one major exception, the news has just confirmed what was already thought or known. So where do we stand?

My views about domestic data collection start:

*Recall that these comments are US-specific. Data retention legislation has been proposed or passed in multiple countries to require recording of, among other things, all URL requests, with the stated goal of fighting either digital piracy or child pornography.

As for foreign data: Read more

April 29, 2013

More on Actian/ParAccel/VectorWise/Versant/etc.

My quick reaction to the Actian/ParAccel deal was negative. A few challenges to my views then emerged. They didn’t really change my mind.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon did a deal with ParAccel that amounted to:

Some argue that this is great for ParAccel’s future prospects. I’m not convinced.

No doubt there are and will be Redshift users, evidently including Infor. But so far as I can tell, Redshift uses very standard SQL, so it doesn’t seed a ParAccel market in terms of developer habits. The administration/operation story is similar. So outside of general validation/bragging rights, Redshift is not a big deal for ParAccel.

OEMs and bragging rights

It’s not just Amazon and Infor; there’s also a MicroStrategy deal to OEM ParAccel — I think it’s the real ParAccel software in that case — for a particular service, MicroStrategy Wisdom. But unless I’m terribly mistaken, HP Vertica, Sybase IQ and even Infobright each have a lot more OEMs than ParAccel, just as they have a lot more customers than ParAccel overall.

This OEM success is a great validation for the idea of columnar analytic RDBMS in general, but I don’t see where it’s an advantage for ParAccel vs. the columnar leaders. Read more

April 25, 2013

Goodbye VectorWise, farewell ParAccel?

Actian, which already owns VectorWise, is also buying ParAccel. The argument for why this kills VectorWise is simple. ParAccel does most things VectorWise does, more or less as well. It also does a lot more:

One might conjecture that ParAccel is bad at highly concurrent, single-node use cases, and VectorWise is better at them — but at the link above, ParAccel bragged of supporting 5,000 concurrent connections. Besides, if one is just looking for a high-use reporting server, why not get Sybase IQ?? Anyhow, Actian hasn’t been investing enough in VectorWise to make it a major market player, and they’re unlikely to start now that they own ParAccel as well.

But I expect ParAccel to fail too. Reasons include:

Read more

February 5, 2013

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 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

December 9, 2012

Amazon Redshift and its implications

Merv Adrian and Doug Henschen both reported more details about Amazon Redshift than I intend to; see also the comments on Doug’s article. I did talk with Rick Glick of ParAccel a bit about the project, and he noted:

“We didn’t want to do the deal on those terms” comments from other companies suggest ParAccel’s main financial take from the deal is an already-reported venture investment.

The cloud-related engineering was mainly around communications, e.g. strengthening error detection/correction to make up for the lack of dedicated switches. In general, Rick seemed more positive on running in the (Amazon) cloud than analytic RDBMS vendors have been in the past.

So who should and will use Amazon Redshift? For starters, I’d say: Read more

September 27, 2012

Hoping for true columnar storage in Oracle12c

I was asked to clarify one of my July comments on Oracle12c,

I wonder whether Oracle will finally introduce a true columnar storage option, a year behind Teradata. That would be the obvious enhancement on the data warehousing side, if they can pull it off. If they can’t, it’s a damning commentary on the core Oracle codebase.

by somebody smart who however seemed to have half-forgotten my post comparing (hybrid) columnar compression to (hybrid) columnar storage.

In simplest terms:

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