Netezza

Analysis of Netezza and its NPS data warehouse appliances. Related subjects include:

June 29, 2009

Xtreme Data readies a different kind of FPGA-based data warehouse appliance

Xtreme Data called me to talk about its plans in the data warehouse appliance business, almost all details of which are currently embargoed. Still, a few points may be worth noting ahead of more precise information, namely:

So far as I can tell, Xtreme Data’s 1.0 product will — like most other 1.0 analytic database management products — be focused on price/performance, without little or no positive differentiation in the way of features.

June 25, 2009

My current customer list among the analytic DBMS specialists

(This is an updated version of an August, 2008 post.)

One of my favorite pages on the Monash Research website is the list of many current and a few notable past customers. (Another favorite page is the one for testimonials.) For a variety of reasons, I won’t undertake to be more precise about my current customer list than that. But I don’t think it would hurt anything to list the analytic/data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:

All of those are Monash Advantage members.

If you care about all this, you may also be interested in the rest of my standards and disclosures.

June 10, 2009

Netezza Q1 earning call transcript

I finally read the Netezza Q1 earnings call transcript, put out by Seeking Alpha.  Highlights included:

One tip for the Netezza folks, by the way, from this former stock analyst — you should never use the word “certainly” about a deal you haven’t closed yet. “Almost surely” could be OK, but “certainly” — well, it certainly was not the thing to say.

February 23, 2009

MapReduce user eHarmony chose Netezza over Aster or Greenplum

Depending on which IDG reporter you believe, eHarmony has either 4 TB of data or more than 12 TB, stored in Oracle but now analyzed on Netezza.  Interestingly, eHarmony is a Hadoop/MapReduce shop, but chose Netezza over Aster Data or Greenplum even so.  Price was apparently an important aspect of the purchase decision. Netezza also seems to have had a very smooth POC. Read more

February 18, 2009

The Netezza guys propose a POC checklist

The Netezza guys at “Data Liberators” are being a bit too cute in talking about FULL DISCLOSURE yet not actually saying they’re from Netezza — but only a bit, in that their identity is pretty clear even so.  That said, they’ve proposed a not-terrible checklist of how to conduct POCs.  Of course, vendor-provided as it is, it’s incomplete; e.g., there’s no real mention of a baseball-bat test.

Here’s the first part of the Netezza list, with my comments interspersed. Read more

February 4, 2009

Draft slides on how to select an analytic DBMS

I need to finalize an already-too-long slide deck on how to select an analytic DBMS by late Thursday night.  Anybody see something I’m overlooking, or just plain got wrong?

Edit: The slides have now been finalized.

January 15, 2009

Netezza’s marketing goes retro again

Netezza loves retro images in its marketing, such as classic rock lyrics, or psychedelic paint jobs on its SPUs.  (Given the age demographics at, say, a Teradata or Netezza user conference, this isn’t as nutty as it first sounds.) Netezza’s latest is a creative peoples-liberation/revolution riff, under the name Data Liberators.  The ambience of that site and especially its first download should seem instinctively familiar to anybody who recalls the Symbionese Liberation Army when it was active, or who has ever participated in a chant of “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”

The substance of the first “pamphlet”, so far as I can make out, is that you should only trust vendors who do short, onsite POCs, and Oracle may not do those for Exadata. Read more

January 12, 2009

Gartner’s 2008 data warehouse database management system Magic Quadrant is out

Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS is out.  Thankfully, vendors don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as usual, so I didn’t immediately hear about.  (I finally noticed it in a Greenplum pay-per-click ad.)  Links to Gartner MQs tend to come and go, but as of now here are two working links to the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System MQ.  My posts on the 2007 and 2006 MQs have also been updated with working links. Read more

November 15, 2008

High-performance analytics

For the past few months, I’ve collected a lot of data points to the effect that high-performance analytics – i.e., beyond straightforward query — is becoming increasingly important. And I’ve written about some of them at length. For example:

Ack. I can’t decide whether “analytics” should be a singular or plural noun. Thoughts?

Another area that’s come up which I haven‘t blogged about so much is data mining in the database. Data mining accounts for a large part of data warehouse use. The traditional way to do data mining is to extract data from the database and dump it into SAS. But there are problems with this scenario, including:

Read more

November 7, 2008

Big scientific databases need to be stored somehow

A year ago, Mike Stonebraker observed that conventional DBMS don’t necessarily do a great job on scientific data, and further pointed out that different kinds of science might call for different data access methods. Even so, some of the largest databases around are scientific ones, and they have to be managed somehow. For example:

Long-term, I imagine that the most suitable DBMS for these purposes will be MPP systems with strong datatype extensibility — e.g., DB2, PostgreSQL-based Greenplum, PostgreSQL-based Aster nCluster, or maybe Oracle.

October 23, 2008

How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart

Once Netezza hit the market, Teradata had a classic “disruptive” price problem – it offered a high end product, at a high price, sporting lots of features that not all customers needed or were willing to pay for. Teradata has at times slashed prices in competitive situations, but there are obvious risks to that, especially when a customer already has a number of other Teradata systems for which it paid closer to full price.

This year, Teradata has introduced a range of products that flesh out its competitive lineup. There now are three mainstream Teradata offerings, plus two with more specialized applicability. Teradata no longer has to sell Cadillacs to customers on Corolla budgets.

But how do we tell the five Teradata product lines apart? The names are confusing, both in their hardware-vendor product numbers and their data-warehousing-dogma product names, especially since in real life Teradata products’ capabilities overlap. Indeed, Teradata executives freely admit that the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 551 can run smaller data warehouses, while the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 is positioned in large part at what Teradata quite reasonably calls data marts.

When one looks past the difficulties of naming, Teradata’s product lineup begins to make more sense. Let’s start by considering the three main Teradata products.

Read more

September 29, 2008

Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda

Eric Lai offers a detailed FAQ on Oracle Exadata, including a good selection of links and quotes. I’d like to offer a few comments in response: Read more

September 26, 2008

Netezza and Teradata on analytic geospatial data management

Geospatial data management is one of the flavors of the month:

So I asked Netezza and Teradata what this geospatial analytics stuff is all about.

Read more

September 26, 2008

So what does Oracle Exadata mean for HP Neoview?

That HP is committed to selling a lot of data warehouse hardware — and probably data warehouse appliances in particular — seems obvious, for reasons including:

But Oracle Exadata could produce those appliance sales. So where does HP Neoview fit in?

I was told by an investor today that HP’s investor relations department is saying Oracle Exadata is a Netezza competitor, while Neoview is more in the Teradata market. That’s laughable. Read more

September 23, 2008

Peter Batty on Netezza Spatial

As previously noted, I’m not up to speed on Netezza Spatial. Phil Francisco of Netezza has promised we’ll fix that ASAP. In the mean time, I found a blog by a guy named Peter Batty, who evidently:

Batty offers a lot of detail in two recent posts, intermixed with some gollygeewhiz about Netezza in general. If you’re interested in this stuff, Batty’s blog is well worth checking out. Read more

September 22, 2008

Web analytics — clickstream and network event data

It should surprise nobody that web analytics – and specifically clickstream data — is one of the biggest areas for high-end data warehousing. For example:

Read more

September 17, 2008

Netezza overseas

22% of Netezza’s revenue comes from outside the US, at least if we use last quarter’s figures as a guide.  At first blush, that doesn’t sound like much.  Indeed, percentage-wise it surely lags behind Teradata, Greenplum (which has sold a lot in Asia/Pacific under Netezza’s former head of that region), and a few smaller competitors headquartered outside the US.  But a few conversations I had today suggest a rosier view.  Read more

September 17, 2008

Netezza application areas

I’m at the Netezza “Enzee” user conference in Orlando.  So one or more Netezza posts are in order.

One theme of the brief analyst meeting was Netezza’s increasing business focus on vertical markets.  In particular, Netezza is hiring managers for a range of vertical markets.  The commercial ones cited (at various levels of maturity) included: Read more

September 17, 2008

More mysteries regarding Oracle CDR load speed

Last spring, DATAllegro user John Devolites of TEOCO told me of troubles his firm had had loading CDRs (Call Detail Records) into Oracle, and how those had been instrumental in his eventual adoption of DATAllegro.  That claim was contemptously challenged in a couple of comment threads.

Well, tonight at the Netezza user conference, Netezza gave awards to its first customers.  The very first to accept was Jim Hayden, who’d bought Netezza for a company called Vibrant Solutions, which coincidentally was later acquired by TEOCO itself.  In front of hundreds of people, he talked about how, back in 2003, it had taken 23 hours to load 400 million CDRs into Oracle on Nextel’s behalf, but only 40 minutes on Netezza.

And I’ll erase the rest of what I’d drafted here, as it was dripping in sarcasm …

September 15, 2008

Teradata decides to compete head-on as a data warehouse appliance vendor

In a press release today that is surely timed to impinge on the Netezza user conference news cycle, Teradata has come out swinging. Highlights include:

Read more

September 12, 2008

Some Netezza customer metrics

From the conference call based on Netezza’s July, 2008 Q1, as of the end of Q1:

September 12, 2008

Teradata/Netezza/Tesco kerfuffle

Netezza evidently put out a press release bragging of a competitive replacement of Teradata at UK retailing giant Tesco. That press release cannot be now found on Netezza’s site, but it lives on elsewhere. Meanwhile, Teradata has put out a press release in which Tesco is quoted emphatically contradicting what it is quoted as saying in the Netezza press release. While I haven’t discussed this with Netezza, my guess is that somebody there got a little overenthusiastic in advance of their user conference next week and thought they’d gotten a permission they really hadn’t.

Beyond that, I’d note that the Netezza quote made reference to around 25 heavy analytical users, while the Teradata quote talked of 8000 people across more than 2000 suppliers.

Read more

September 8, 2008

The layered messaging marketing model as applied to Netezza

I just put up a post claiming that enterprise IT marketing arguments commonly boil down to one of two layered messaging templates. Let’s test how that claim applies to one of the most innovative technology companies of this decade: Netezza.

Read more

September 4, 2008

More data on data warehouse sizes and issues

I spoke today with Paul Barth and Randy Bean of consultancy NewVantage Partners. The core of NewVantage’s business seems to be helping large enterprises (especially financial services) with their data warehouse strategies. Takeaways — none of which should shock regular readers of DBMS2 — included:

August 29, 2008

Enterprises are buying multiple brands of analytic DBMS each

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of NDA discussions about analytic DBMS vendors’ specific customers. And so I’ve been acutely aware of something I already sort of knew — just as there was in prior generations of database management technology, there’s huge overlap among analytic DBMS vendors’ customer bases as well. As they always have, enterprises are investing in multiple different brands of DBMS, even in cases where those DBMS can do pretty much the same things.

For example:

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