April 5th, 2008 Curt Monash
There now are four hardware vendors that each offer or seem about to announce two different tiers of data warehouse appliances: Sun, HP, EMC, and Teradata. Specifically:
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Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Infobright and Brighthouse, Kognitio and WX2, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Relational database management systems, Sybase, Teradata | 4 Comments »
January 31st, 2008 Curt Monash
After a flurry of recent announcements of database SaaS (Software as a Service), eWeek has published a backlash article. The angle is that database SaaS is too expensive, because you can get decent DBMS for free and per-gig usage charges might be expensive for big databases.
I think that’s missing the point. Most OLTP databases are pretty small. Or, if they’re big, they get that way through a lot of transactions. In the first case, hosted management is cheap. In the second case, hosted management is taking care of a large burden for you. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Kognitio and WX2, OLTP database management, SaaS | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2008 Curt Monash
I had a call today with Kognitio execs Paul Groom and John Thompson. Hopefully I can now clear up some confusion that was created in this comment thread. (Most of what I wrote about Kognitio in October, 2006 still applies.) Here are some highlights. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kognitio and WX2, Relational database management systems | 9 Comments »
December 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
There are at least 16 different vendors offering appliances and/or software that do database management primarily for analytic purposes.* That’s a lot to keep up with,. So I’ve thrown together a little overview of the analytic data management landscape, liberally salted with links to information about specific vendors, products, or technical issues. In some ways, this is a companion piece to my prior post about data warehouse appliance myths and realities.
*And that’s just the tabular/alphanumeric guys. Add in text search and you run the total a lot higher.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Cognos and Applix TM1, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Greenplum, IBM and DB2, Kognitio and WX2, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Relational database management systems, SAS Institute, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments »
November 29th, 2007 Curt Monash
Netezza reported a big October quarter, ahead of expectations. And official guidance for next quarter is essentially flat quarter-over-quarter, suggesting Q3 was indeed surprisingly big. However, Netezza’s year-over-year growth for Q3 was a little under 50%, suggesting the quarter wasn’t so remarkable after all. (Netezza has a January fiscal year.)
Tentative conclusion: Netezza just tends to have big October quarters, perhaps by timing sales cycles to finish soon after the late September user conference. If Netezza’s user conference ever moves to later in the fall, expect Q3 to be weak that year.
Netezza reported 18 new customers, double last year’s figure. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Kognitio and WX2, Netezza, Relational database management systems | 3 Comments »
October 19th, 2007 Curt Monash
It’s early autumn, the leaves are turning in New England, and Gartner has issued another Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS. The big winners vs. last year are Greenplum and, secondarily, Sybase. Teradata continues to lead. Oracle has also leapfrogged IBM, and there are various other minor adjustments as well, among repeat mentionees Netezza, DATAllegro, Sand, Kognitio, and MySQL. HP isn’t on the radar yet; ditto Vertica. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Kognitio and WX2, MySQL, Netezza, Oracle, Relational database management systems, Sybase, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments »
April 11th, 2007 Curt Monash
The fourth Monash Letter is now posted for Monash Advantage members (just 3 pages this time). It’s about forthcoming M&A in data warehouse DBMS, something that seems likely just because of the large number of current players. Some of the observations are:
- Oracle needs to buy somebody, because of its rather dire product problems at the data warehouse high end. And it’s very much in keeping with their recent behavior to do so.
- Teradata could be acquired sooner than people think. While there are tax considerations preventing an outright sale, these should be obviated if all of the current NCR is taken private. What’s more NCR minus Teradata is exactly the kind of healthy, slow-growth, niche company that private equity loves.
- DATAllegro is a natural merger partner for somebody. Their technical differentiation is almost DBMS-independent, so it could be easy to roll them into a larger overall product strategy. And they have enough market traction to have proved some non-trivial value.
- Kognitio seems desperate these days, with several odd or even underhanded marketing tactics. But they do have MPP bitmap software, something Sybase sorely lacks. So there’s an obvious potential combination between those two.
Technorati Tags: NCR, Teradata, Oracle, DATAllegro, Kognitio, Sybase, private equity, data warehouse, database management, software
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehousing, Kognitio and WX2, Oracle, Relational database management systems, Sybase, Teradata | 2 Comments »
March 19th, 2007 Curt Monash
Stuart Frost of DATAllegro offered an interesting counter today to columnar DBMS architectures — vertical partitioning. In particular, he told me of a 120 terabyte (growing soon to 250 terabytes) call data record database, in which a few key columns were separated out. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Columnar architectures, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kognitio and WX2, Relational database management systems, Vertica Systems | 9 Comments »
January 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
Recently, I’ve done extensive research into the hardware strategies of computing appliance vendors, across multiple functional areas. Data warehousing, firewall/unified threat management, antispam, data integration – you name it, I talked to them. Of course, each vendor has a unique twist. But some architectural groupings definitely emerged.
The most common approaches seem to be:
Type 1: Custom assembly from off-the-shelf parts. In this model, the only unusual (but still off-the-shelf) parts are usually in the area of network acceleration (or occasionally encryption). Also, the box may be balanced differently than standard systems, in terms of compute power and/or reliability.
Type 2 (Virtual): We don’t need no stinkin’ custom hardware. In this model, the only “appliancy” features are in the area of easy deployment, custom operating systems, and/or preconfigured hardware.
And of course there are also appliances of Type 0: Custom hardware including proprietary ASICs or FPGAs.
Different markets had different emphases; e.g., firewall appliances are typically Type 1, while antispam devices cluster in Type 2. But the data warehouse appliance market is highly diverse, which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the revenue market leader is non-appliance software vendor Oracle, while noisy upstart Netezza is famous for its FPGA.
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Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, IBM and DB2, Kognitio and WX2, Netezza, Relational database management systems, Teradata | 4 Comments »
January 22nd, 2007 Curt Monash
The best known columnar RDBMS is surely Sybase’s IQ Accelerator, evolved from a product acquired in the mid-1990s. Problem – it doesn’t have a shared-nothing architecture of the sort needed to exploit grid/blade technology. Whoops. The other recognized player is SAND, but I don’t know a lot about them. Based on their website, it would seem that grids and compression play a big part in their story. Less established but pretty interesting is Kognitio, who are just beginning to make marketing noise outside the UK. SAP’s BI Accelerator is also a compressed columnar system, but operates entirely in-memory and hence is limited in possible database size. Mike Stonebraker’s startup Vertica is of course the new kid on the block, and there are other columnar startups as well whose names currently escape me.
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Posted in Data warehousing, Kognitio and WX2, Relational database management systems, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB, TransRelational | 2 Comments »
January 22nd, 2007 Curt Monash
If Mike Stonebraker is to be believed, the era of columnar data stores is upon us.
Whether or not you buy completely into Mike’s claims, there certainly are cool ideas in his latest columnar offering, from startup Vertica Systems. The Vertica corporate site offers little detail, but Mike tells me that the product’s architecture closely resembles that of C-Store, which is described in this November, 2005 paper.
The core ideas behind Vertica’s product are as follows. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Columnar architectures, Data warehousing, Database compression, Database theory and practice, Kognitio and WX2, Memory-centric data management, Netezza, Products and vendors, Relational database management systems, Vertica Systems | 15 Comments »
October 5th, 2006 Curt Monash
Kognitio called me for a briefing this morning on their WX-2 product. Technical highlights included:
- Their core technology is MPP/shared-nothing data warehousing.
- Unlike most other vendors (but like Greenplum), they are available software-only.
- Like DATallegro and Netezza, they have no global indexing.
- Unlike the other MPP players, they don’t hash partition the data and lead with hash joins. Rather, they have local compressed bitmap indices on every node.
- Similarly, they distribute data utterly randomly and have no concept of range partitioning whatsoever.
- Probably for that reason, WX-2 reads data in small 32K blocks. This forfeits the benefit of sequential reads, unless David Aldridge is correct that Linux can take care of that on its own.
- They seem more chip-heavy than DATallegro and Netezza. A dual-core Opteron blade with 16 or 32 gigabytes of RAM talks to 144, 288, or in some cases 600 gigabytes of disk (before mirroring).
- The position themselves somewhat as being a memory-centric product supplier. While I suspect this is exaggerated, it probably indicates that they’ve put some work into managing RAM as well as disk.
Much like the other “new” MPP data warehouse vendors, Kognitio claims to never have knowingly been outbenchmarked, whether on performance or on TCO factors such as ease of installation.
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Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Kognitio and WX2, Memory-centric data management, Relational database management systems | 9 Comments »