May 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
Call me slow on the uptake if you like, but it’s finally dawned on me that outsourced data marts are a nontrivial segment of the analytics business. For example:
- I was just briefed by Vertica, and got the impression that data mart outsourcers may be Vertica’s #3 vertical market, after financial services and telecom. Certainly it seems like they are Vertica’s #3 market if you bundle together data mart outsourcers and more conventional OEMs.
- When Netezza started out, a bunch of its early customers were credit data-based analytics outsourcers like Acxiom.
- After nagging DATAllegro for a production reference, I finally got a good one — TEOCO. TEOCO specializes in figuring out whether inter-carrier telcom bills are correct. While there’s certainly a transactional invoice-processing aspect to this, the business seems to hinge mainly around doing calculations to figure out correct charges.
- I was talking with Pervasive about Pervasive Datarush, a beta product that lets you do super-fast analytics on data even if you never load it into a DBMS in the first place. I challenged them for use cases. One user turns out to be an insurance claims rule-checking outsourcer.
- One of Infobright’s references is a French CRM analytics outsourcer, 1024 Degres.
- 1010data has built up a client base of 50-60, including a number of financial and retail blue-chippers, with a soup-to-nuts BI/analysis/columnar database stack.
- I haven’t heard much about Verix in a while, but their niche was combining internal sales figures with external point-of-sale/prescription data to assess retail (especially pharma) microtrends.
To a first approximation, here’s what I think is going on. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 1010data, Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cloud computing, Data warehousing, Infobright and Brighthouse, Netezza, Pervasive Software, SaaS, Specific users, TEOCO, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment »
April 21st, 2008 Curt Monash
In connection with the announcement of the Teradata 2500, I asked some Teradata competitors about pricing. Netezza’s response amounted to “We don’t disclose list pricing, but our cheapest system handles about 3 1/4 TB and sells for under $200K.” So Netezza’s actual pricing is well below the list price of the Teradata 2500.
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Teradata | 6 Comments »
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:
Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
April 1st, 2008 Curt Monash
Short and cute. Even makes a genuine marketing point (low power consumption), and ties into past marketing gimmicks (they’ve played Pimp My SPU in the past, with dramatic paint jobs).
Netezza Corporation (NYSE Arca: NZ), the global leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances, today introduced a limited-edition range of its award-winning Netezza system. Expected to become an instant industry collectible, the systems can now be purchased in a variety of color finishes – pink, blue, red or silver. The standard gun-metal gray unit will continue to be the default option for orders requiring eight or more units, to ensure availability.
Affectionately known as ‘the Netezza’ by customers and partners, the systems not only offer unparalleled processing performance, but the secret sauce of its innovative design is also leading the way in effective power and cooling management – making it a truly green option for any data center.
Not earth-shaking — even if it purports to be earth-saving — but unless I’ve overlooked a biggie, there isn’t much competition this rather lame April Fool’s year.
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza | 2 Comments »
January 31st, 2008 Curt Monash
The problem with filling a VP Marketing job is that all the good ones want — and are qualified — to be CEOs. It’s possible to have a great sales manager who doesn’t understand technology very well, or a wonderful development chief who doesn’t quite mesh with coin-operated sales folks. But a marketer has to understand sales and technology and strategy and a bit of management, and hence the best ones are safe bets to move on to CEO opportunities.
And so Ellen Rubin is leaving Netezza, after six years. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Netezza | 5 Comments »
January 14th, 2008 Curt Monash
I’m getting a flood of press releases today, because many of the companies I write about were selected to Intelligent Enterprise’s list of 12 most influential vendors plus 36 more to watch in the areas Intelligent Enterprise covers (which seems to be pretty much the analytics-related parts of what I write about here and on Text Technologies). It looks like a pretty reasonable list, although I think they forced the issue in some of the small analytics vendors they selected, and of course anybody can quibble with some of the omissions.
Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.
Posted in Business Objects, Cast Iron Systems, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, Informatica, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB, SAS Institute, Software AG and ADABAS, StreamBase, Teradata | No Comments »
January 10th, 2008 Curt Monash
Netezza is promising petabyte-scale appliances later this year, up from 100 terabytes. That’s user data (I checked), and assumes 2-3X compression, or a little less than they think is actually likely. I.e., they’re describing their capacity in the same kinds of terms other responsible vendors do. They haven’t actually built and tested any 1 petabyte systems internally yet, but they’ve gone over 100 terabytes.
Basically, this leaves Netezza’s high-end capability about 10X below Teradata’s. On the other hand, it should leave them capable of handling pretty much every Teradata database in existence. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Teradata | No 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 »
December 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
The proximate cause for today’s flurry of Netezza-related posts is that the company has finally rolled out its compression story. In a nutshell, Netezza has developed its own version of columnar delta compression, slated to ship May, 2008. It compresses 2-5X, with the factor sometimes going up into double digits. Netezza estimates this produces a 2-3X improvement in overall performance, with the core marketing claim being that performance will “double” from compression alone. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Database theory and practice, Netezza, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
December 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
In 1993, Ted Codd introduced the term OLAP (OnLine Analytic Processing) to describe data management that wasn’t optimized for OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing). Later in the 1990s, Henry Morris of IDC introduced the term analytic applications to describe apps that weren’t transactional. Since then, no better word than “analytic” has emerged to cover the broad class of IT apps and technologies that aren’t focused on transactional processing.
In the latest incarnation, analytic appliances are coming to the fore. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Netezza, Relational database management systems, Vertica Systems | No Comments »
December 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve bashed Netezza repeatedly for secrecy and obscurity about its technology and technical plans. Well, they’re getting a lot better. The latest post in a Netezza company blog, by marketing exec Phil Francisco, lays out their story clearly and concisely. And it’s backed up by a white paper that does more of the same. In particular, Page 11 of that white paper spells out possible future directions for enhancement, such as better compression, encryption, join filtering, and Netezza Developer Network stuff. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Relational database management systems | 2 Comments »
December 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
I talked with Netezza today, and finally understand better why they don’t have node-to-node data shipping problems with only 1-gigabit (gigE) interconnects:
- Netezza boxes have lots of relatively small nodes, so all else being equal, each individual node has less communicating to do than, say, a DATAllegro node does.
- It’s not just just 1-gigabit. There’s a hierarchical communications architecture, and at one level in the hierarchy switches are talking to each other through 32 parallel 1-gigabit channels at a time.
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Netezza | No 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 31st, 2007 Curt Monash
Netezza is finally making it clear that they run some largish warehouses. Their latest press release cites Catalina Marketing, Epsilon, and NYSE Euronext as having 50+ terabytes each. I checked with Netezza’s Marketing VP Ellen Rubin, and she confirmed that those are clean figures — user data, single warehouses, etc. Ellen further tells me that Netezza’s total count of warehouses that big is “significantly more” than the 3 named in the release.
Of course, this makes sense, given that Netezza’s largest box, the NPS 10800, runs 100 terabytes. And Catalina was named as having bought a 10800 in a press release back in December, 2006. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Relational database management systems | 1 Comment »
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 »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve pointed out in the past that solid-state/Flash memory could be a good alternative to hard disks in PCs and enterprise systems alike. Well, when that happy day arrives, what will be some of the implications for database management software architecture?
- Compression will be even more important. Cost per terabyte of storage will spike up for that storage that is moved from disk to solid-state.
- The sequential-rather-than-random reading strategy of data warehouse appliance makers may become less relevant. The one way to get rid of the disk-speed bottleneck is to get rid of disks.
- DBMS will need to write data as rarely as possible. Solid-state memory tends to wear out if you keep writing over it. Assuming this problem gets better over time (if it doesn’t, this whole discussion is moot) but isn’t totally solved, architectures which have fewer writes are on the whole better.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Database theory and practice, Netezza, Specialized data management in general | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
I just found a blog post asking about Netezza that elicited quite a few responses, including at least four that purported to be from people whose companies had selected Netezza in a POC (Proof Of Concept) bake-off. One says Netezza was super-fast, even over DATAllegro, and DATAllegro’s professional services were lacking. One says Netezza is 50X faster than traditional alternatives on some queries, but up to 2X slower on some others. Two others just expressed love (or at least commitment) without giving details.
I haven’t yet looked through the rest of the responses in the thread.
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Technorati Tags: Netezza, data warehousing, data warehouse appliance, proof of concept
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza | 3 Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is:
- Extending Netezza’s SQL via user-defined functions (which probably wasn’t too hard, especially since the Netezza engine is related to PostgreSQL).
- Providing a C-to-Verilog compiler.
- Providing an application development environment and associated tools. (Presumably rather primitive, but I haven’t really checked it out.)
The applications mentioned in the NDN press release, and I quote directly, are:
- Multi-dimensional geospatial analytics on comprehensive data sets for risk management
- Predictive model scoring for customer segmentation, enabling real-time offer provisioning for customers
- Iterative modeling and analytics on billions of call detail records (CDRs) for telco price optimization
- Real-time Monte Carlo simulations on terabytes of detail-level data for risk management
- “Fingerprinting” with hashing algorithms for chain-of-custody document fingerprinting and to ensure that files transferred are intact
- Fuzzy text search analysis uses algorithms that provide a “best guess” of most likely results
Netezza says that the greatest interest has come from usual-suspect sophisticated users, specifically intelligence agencies and perhaps also financial services firms. But naturally, the partners actually trotted out at Netezza’s user conference were mainly hopeful small-company ISVs. The biggest stir was made by not-so-small SAS, which evidently believes this new capability will provide massive improvements to SAS/Netezza combined performance.
In principle, there are four different ways this new programmability could be a big win: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Native XML, Netezza, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, SAS Institute, Specialized data management in general | 8 Comments »
September 26th, 2007 Curt Monash
EDIT: Big whoops, and apologies to Philip. I didn’t check the date, and what I linked to was last year’s article. That said, it read as if it could have been this year’s, which tells us something about the pace of Netezza’s information disclosure. Resulting errors of mine are left in place.
Netezza perennially annoys me by the secrecy with which it surrounds its information disclosure, especially at the annual user conference (just concluded). Essentially, except for what has also been separately disclosed, the whole thing is under NDA beyond the generality “We told you that we intend to improve our product by making more use of the FPGA.” Blech. That said, Philip Howard* has a long and — no surprise there! — upbeat article. So I’ll link to that, saving me some worries about what I myself am or am not allowed to say. E.g., I wouldn’t dare suggest — as Philip does — that Netezza’s zone maps (essentially, one-dimensional partitioning) could be enhanced going forward. And while I think Netezza has made strong efforts to tell the marketing stories Philip describes as being “hidden under a bushel,” I agree that — largely because of its self-defeating mania for secrecy — Netezza hasn’t done nearly as good a job of getting those messages accepted as it could have.
*Just to be clear — notwithstanding how much I tweak him for his exuberance, Philip seems to be a great guy, both in his publications and in person.
In general, much of what Philip wrote I would agree with. That said, let me hasten to point out some exceptions, including: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Relational database management systems | 2 Comments »
September 24th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been slow to notice a very useful service being provided by Seeking Alpha, namely transcripts of quarterly earnings conference calls. For example, the Netezza call on August 23 revealed that Netezza sells approximately as many systems per year as it has quota-carrying sales teams. Or maybe it’s closer to 2 sales per team, especially for the more experienced ones. More precisely, the numbers discussed were 6-15 sales per quarter, and 35 sales teams. Average deal size was $2.3 million; based on the earnings press release, that suggests 10-11 deals depending on how much service revenue (if any) was included.
And by the way, if Netezza does 6-15 sales per quarter, and has a much smaller average sale than DATAllegro, and has much more revenue than DATAllegro — well, it’s easy to understand why DATAllegro isn’t exhibiting a very long list of customers.
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Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza | 1 Comment »
July 25th, 2007 Curt Monash
DATAllegro Stuart Frost called in for a prebriefing/feedback/consulting session. (I love advising my DBMS vendor clients on how to beat each other’s brains in. This was even more fun in the 1990s, when combat was generally more aggressive. Those were also the days when somebody would change jobs to an arch-rival and immediately explain how everything they’d told me before was utterly false …)
While I had Stuart on the phone, I did manage to extract some stuff I’m at liberty to use immediately. Here are the highlights: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Greenplum, Netezza, Relational database management systems, Teradata | 4 Comments »
June 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
The word from Vertica is that the product will go GA in the fall, and that they’ll have blow-out benchmarks to exhibit.
I find this very credible. Indeed, the above may even be something of an understatement.
Vertica’s product surely has some drawbacks, which will become more apparent when the product is more available for examination. So I don’t expect row-based appliance innovators Netezza and DATAllegro to just dry up and blow away. On the other hand, not every data warehousing product is going to live long and prosper, and I’d rate Vertica’s chances higher than those of several competitors that are actually already in GA.
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Posted in Columnar architectures, DATAllegro, Data warehousing, Netezza, Vertica Systems | 2 Comments »
March 16th, 2007 Curt Monash
I talk to a lot of data warehouse software and/or appliance start-ups. Naturally, they’re all gunning for Netezza, and regale me with stories about competitive replacements, competitive wins, benchmark wins, and the like. And there have been a couple of personnel departures too, notably development chief Bill Blake. Netezza insists this is because he got a CEO offer he couldn’t refuse, he’s still friendly with the company, development plans are entirely on track, and news of some sort is coming out in a few weeks. Also, Greenplum brags that its Asia/Pacific manager was snagged from Netezza.
On the other hand, Netezza claims lots of sales momentum, and that’s certainly consistent with what I hear from its competitors. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Netezza, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
March 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
I haven’t been as clear as I could have been in explaining why I think MPP/shared-nothing beats SMP/shared-everything. The answer is in a short white paper, currently bottlenecked at the sponsor’s end of the process. Here’s an excerpt from the latest draft:
There are two ways to make more powerful computers:
1. Use more powerful parts – processors, disk drives, etc.
2. Just use more parts of the same power.
Of the two, the more-parts strategy much more cost-effective. Smaller* parts are much more economical, since the bigger the part, the harder and more costly it is to avoid defects, in manufacturing and initial design alike. Consequently, all high-end computers rely on some kind of parallel processing.
*As measured in terms of capacity, transistor count, etc., not physical size.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database theory and practice, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Netezza, Oracle, Relational database management systems, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments »
February 23rd, 2007 Curt Monash
Business Intelligence Lowdown has a well-dugg post listing what it claims are the 10 largest databases in the world. The accuracy leaves much to be desired, as is illustrated by the fact that #10 on the list is only 20 terabytes, while entirely unmentioned is eBay’s 2-petabyte database (mentioned here, and also here). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database theory and practice, Greenplum, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute, Teradata | 3 Comments »