Unfortunately, we have had to reduce our burn rate as we seek an acquirer for our technology.

We have a group of loyal employees remaining on staff focused on current production customers and the acquisition efforts.

As part of the most recent staff reductions I will be leaving Dataupia.

Two years ago I wrote:

[Dataupia would] make a great acquisition for a BI company or DBMS vendor who could then say “Oh, no, this isn’t a DBMS appliance – it’s merely a data warehouse accelerator.” When you look at it that way, their chances of prospering look distinctly higher.

But at this point I think there probably would be more appealing ways for those vendors to meet the same needs.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2009/08/05/dataupia-is-officially-for-sale/feed/ 13 http://www.dbms2.com/2009/07/30/the-netezza-price-point/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/07/30/the-netezza-price-point/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:13:52 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=854 Over the past couple of years, quite a few data warehouse appliance or DBMS vendors have talked to me directly in terms of “Netezza’s price point,” or some similar phrase. Some have indicated that they’re right around the Netezza price point, but think their products are superior to Netezza’s. Others have stressed the large gap between their price and Netezza’s. But one way or the other, “Netezza’s price” has been an industry metric.

One reason everybody talks about the “Netezza (list) price” is that it hasn’t been changing much, seemingly staying stable at $50-60K/terabyte for a long time. And thus Teradata’s 2550 and Oracle’s larger-disk Exadata configuration — both priced more or less in the same range — have clearly been price-competitive with Netezza since their respective introductions.

That just changed. Netezza is cutting its pricing to the $20K/terabyte range imminently, with further cuts to come. So where does that leave competitors?

• The Teradata 1550 is in the Netezza price range (still a little below, actually).
• Oracle basically has nothing price-competitive with Netezza.
• Microsoft has stated it plans to introduce Madison below the old DATAllegro price points; conceivably, that could be competitive with Netezza’s new pricing, although I haven’t checked as to how much it now costs simply to buy a lot of SQL Server licenses (which presumably would be a Madison lower bound, and might except for hardware be the whole thing, since Microsoft likes to create large product bundles).
• XtremeData just launched in the new Netezza price range.
• Troubled Dataupia is hard to judge. While on the surface Dataupia’s prices sound very low, you can’t use a Dataupia box unless you also have a brand-name DBMS (license and hardware) alongside it. That obviously affects total cost significantly.
• Kickfire seems unaffected, as it doesn’t and most likely won’t compete with Netezza (different database size ranges).
• For the most part, software-only vendors are free to adapt or not as they choose. Hardware prices generally don’t need to be over $10K/terabyte, and in some cases could be a lot less. So the question is how far they’re willing to discount their software.

• Experience consistently shows that the demand for transparency/emulation features isn’t as great as entrepreneurs hope.
• If a startup’s competitors sell directly to enterprises, an indirect sales strategy rarely succeeds.

Maybe one or the other will learn from Dataupia’s example.

The article goes on to discuss difficulties Dataupia has had in raising another round of financing.  During Dataupia’s very long CEO search — which I kept hearing about from people who’d been approached for the job — it was obvious money wouldn’t come in until a CEO was found. But it seems that even with a new CEO, existing investors are reluctant to re-up without a new investor as well, and that new investment is slow in happening.

On the plus side, the article quotes Samantha as saying founder Foster Hinshaw is recovering well from his heart surgery.

*The looseness in that definition highlights a key reason these technologies don’t sell well — it’s hard to be sure that what you’re buying will do a good job of running your particular apps.

This subject comes to mind for two reasons. One is that IBM seems to have licensed EnterpriseDB’s Oracle transparency layer for DB2. The other is that a natural upgrade path from MySQL to Oracle might be a MySQL transparency layer on top of an Oracle base.

At first blush, the Oracle/MySQL possibility could break the mold. Migrating from one product to another product owned by the same vendor is a lot different than migrating from one vendor’s product to another’s. Users have tremendous familiarity with upgrades where one vendor controls both the start and end points of the transition.

On the other hand, the number of cases where a vendor has bought a DBMS product and then migrating a substantial user base over to another DBMS is approximately zero. The template for reasonably successful DBMS vendor consolidations — such as IBM/Informix or Oracle/RDB — is almost always to maintain and enhance multiple product lines side by side.

As for EnterpriseDB/DB2 — if you have an application running on Oracle, why port it to DB2? Unless IBM gets aggressive on its maintenance licensing terms, that won’t even get you much of a first-glance cost saving. And while it’s annoying to do DBA work for two database brands when one will suffice — if you have those Oracle apps already running, then you also already have the DBA resource to keep them going. No doubt there will be situations where this new offering is useful and welcome, but they’ll probably prove to be rather isolated edge cases.

A couple of years ago, I did make a theoretical argument that DBMS portability should become technically easier and hence more widely adopted. But since then I’ve seen very little practical evidence to back it up.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2009/04/22/dbms-transparency-layers-never-seem-to-sell-well/feed/ 11 http://www.dbms2.com/2008/07/03/declaration-of-data-independence-humor/ http://www.dbms2.com/2008/07/03/declaration-of-data-independence-humor/#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:52:28 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=454 The data warehouse appliance industry has a well-developed funny bone. Dataupia’s contribution is a Declaration of Data Independence, which begins:

When in the Course of an increasingly competitive global economy it becomes necessary for one data set to dissolve its connections to a constraining environment, the separate but inherently unequal station to which the Laws of Whose budget is larger prevails.

Related links:

• Cartoons from DATAllegro
• April Fool press release from Netezza

Some examples, comparing Oracle Technology Global Price Lists from December 2007 and June 2008 (prices are per processor):

1. Oracle Database Enterprise Edition: $40,000 to $47,500 = 18.75%
2. Berkeley DB XML – HA: $12,000 to $13,800 = 15%
3. Database Gateway for DRDA: $40,000 to $46,000 = 15%
4. Database Gateway for Informix: $15,000 to $17,500 = 16.67%
5. Express Server: $40,000 to $47,500 = 18.75%
6. Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus: $255,000 to $295,000 = 15.69%
7. Hyperion Essbase System 9: $160,000 to $184,000 = 15%
8. Universal Content Management: $100,000 to $115,000 = 15%

Good news for Oracle shareholders, I guess, that Oracle thinks it can pull this off. But also good news for vendors of lower-cost alternatives, especially lower-cost ones such as EnterpriseDB and Dataupia.

• Sun partners with both Greenplum and ParAccel.

• HP sells Neoview, and also is partnered with Vertica.

• EMC (together with Dell in North America and Bull in Europe) sells DATAllegro. Now EMC is also entering a partnership with ParAccel.

• Teradata is pretty far down the road toward releasing a low-end product.

In addition, multiple hardware vendors have “reference architecture” technical arrangements with Oracle, to try to capture some of the benefits of appliances. And IBM is constantly in partnership discussions with data warehouse specialists, notwithstanding having multiple data warehouse offerings of its own.

Positioning of these various offerings is confused. Part of the reason is the large vendors’ postures “We’re big and trustworthy, and those little upstart vendors aren’t – until the moment we partner with one of them.” Part of the reason is the small vendors’ stances of “We can do all things for all people – and by the way, 9 of the 14 customers we’ve ever had are all doing pretty much the same thing.” And part of the reason is just an industry penchant for secrecy.

To a first approximation, I think there are two sensible ways to define the tiers. In each case, we’re talking about what kinds of databases the various products are suited for.

• Criterion S (for “Size”). “Bigger than Oracle can handle” vs. “Small enough that Oracle can handle it” (but that depends on what the definition of “handle” is).

• Criterion U (for “Usage”). “Full enterprise data warehouse” vs. “big honking data mart”.

But those are very different classification rules – many products that might be upper-tier by Criterion S are lower-tier by Criterion U, and vice-versa. For example:

• Teradata’s current products are at the upper end by either criterion. Even so, a significant fraction of older Teradata installations are below 5 terabytes or even 1 terabyte in size.

• More generally, Teradata emphasizes Criterion U. Hence any future low-end products will surely be positioned as lower-tier by that criterion. Beyond that, I wouldn’t be surprised if release is delayed, with the final version of those products being different than what previously leaked. E.g., they might well be designed to compete with newer vendors that are upper-tier by Criterion S.

• Netezza has clearly made it into the upper tier by the Size criterion. Most of its installations are lower-tier by Criterion U, but it trumpets a few exceptions that it describes as “enterprise data warehouses” in success stories.

• DATAllegro is upper tier by Criterion S — more so than any other vendor except Teradata, in that there are at least two credible stories of DATAllegro warehouses at or above the quarter-petabyte mark. Even so, DATAllegro is still mainly in the lower tier by Criterion U. I.e., the most natural use of DATAllegro technology is to build Very Big data marts.

• Vertica is a purely lower-tier Criterion U player, given its focus on single fact table schemas. But it’s well on its way into the upper tier by Criterion S.

• Dataupia straddles the boundary of the tiers by Criterion S. That is, it’s meant to offload existing Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2 databases, or in some OEM cases to be a cheaper alternative. That sounds lower-tier. On the other hand, it has one 120 terabyte reference, which puts it squarely in in the upper tier. By Criterion U it’s pretty lower-tier.

• ParAccel seems lower-tier by either criterion. And I’m too burned out on ParAccel’s secrecy to probe hard for exceptions.

• Oracle, MS SQL Server, et al. are – pretty much by definition – lower-tier by Criterion S, but upper-tier by Criterion U.

• HP Neoview is obviously meant to get to the higher end by both criteria. But like most specialty products, right now it’s further along by the Size criterion than the Usage one. Even so, it seems no further along by Criterion S than partner HP’s partner Vertica is.

• Greenplum has clearly gotten to the upper tier by the Size criterion. But like most of the competition, it still seems to be in the lower tier by Usage.

• Infobright is in the lower tier by either criterion. (They don’t even have an MPP offering yet.)

• Kognitio KX2 is in the lower tier by either criterion. However, Kognitio aspires to move up when measured by Usage.

• The last time I looked, Sybase IQ was lower tier by either criterion.

Related links:

• A quick survey of data warehouse management technology
• Data warehouse appliances — fact and fiction

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What I’ve gleaned about Dataupia’s customer activity to date amounts to:

• Four OEMs, whose names you can get from Dataupia’s website. These OEMs are in the telecom area, broadly construed, both in CDR (Call Detail Record) and other types of applications.
• One customer of one OEM that has a live system with 120 terabytes of user data (reported as 150 terabytes of “data” in the press release).
• Undisclosed numbers of sales cycles with undisclosed degrees of success to date. This activity is in telecom, retail, clickstream — which may or may not overlap with the others — and perhaps other undisclosed sectors as well.

Somewhere in all this is an undisclosed number of wins at undisclosed degrees of installation maturity. Dataupia generally isn’t competing with the other MPP data warehouse specialist vendors, but rather with the alternative of keeping on using a mainstream DBMS such as Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2.

Despite plans to eventually do a great job of supporting all kinds of schemas, Dataupia’s early technical focus is apparently on the same kinds of single-fact-table – or at least single-key – application most other specialty data warehouse products also work best on. I got the sense that Dataupia’s customer activity lines up accordingly. But the biggest thing to remember about their positioning is that while Dataupia doesn’t claim the fastest performance, it does try to be very low cost, in purchase price and installation pain alike.

Numerous data warehouse specialists offer traditional row-based relational DBMS architectures, but optimize them for analytic workloads. These include Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Dataupia, and SAS. All of those except SAS are wholly or primarily vendors of MPP/shared-nothing data warehouse appliances. EDIT: See the comment thread for a correction re Kognitio.

Numerous data warehouse specialists offer column-based relational DBMS architectures. These include Sybase (with the Sybase IQ product, originally from Expressway), Vertica, ParAccel, Infobright, Kognitio (formerly White Cross), and Sand. Their products are generally available in software-only formats, although Vertica and ParAccel package their offerings as appliances too.

There are some array-based MOLAP (Multidimensional OnLine Analytical Processing) systems left. But the major ones are all now at Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. Essbase wound up at Oracle, via the Hyperion acquisition. Express went to Oracle long ago, and got tightly integrated into the Oracle DBMS. Microsoft Analysis Services contains a MOLAP engine federated to Microsoft SQL Server. Applix‘s memory-centric TM1 went to Cognos, which had a couple of other MOLAP engines as well; Cognos is being bought by IBM.

There aren’t any star-schema specialists of note left. Most of them – actually just two, namely Red Brick and Stanford — merged into Informix a decade ago. Informix was later bought (in two stages) by IBM. Star schemas are now just a feature of general-purpose systems.

Of course, every general-purpose relational database management system can be used for a lot of analytic purposes. That’s the whole reason Codd introduced the relational model. What’s more, the leading SMP/shared-everything DBMS – Oracle, DB2 mainframe, and to a lesser extent Microsoft SQL Server – can be used even for very large databases, if you partition carefully and write your SQL code accordingly.

That’s 14 vendors already, without mentioning Calpont (hasn’t briefed me recently enough), HP (ditto, and partly working through Vertica), Sun (working through Greenplum and ParAccel), Attivio, the memory-centric engines of BI vendors such as QlikTech and SAP (not exactly database management), or the complex event/stream processing vendors such as Coral8, StreamBase, or Progress Apama (ditto). Methinks there’s some consolidation ahead.

Yet more links:

• Why Oracle and Microsoft are losing in VLDB data warehousing
• Three ways Oracle and Microsoft could catch up in MPP data warehousing
• IBM is oddly weak in the data warehouse market
• Some very big Teradata sites
• Extensive and overlapping coverage of Netezza, Vertica, database compression, and column-oriented database architectures.
• DATAllegro as an exemplar of non-proprietary index-light MPP data warehouse appliances
• An old article on Oracle’s integration of Express.