Netezza Q1 earning call transcript

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

• Netezza got 14 new-name accounts and 21 follow-on deals. Average sale in both groups was right around $1 million.
• The economy is tough, deals are slipping, and nobody knows for sure what will happen.
• Netezza’s main head-to-head competitors are Oracle and Teradata.  Netezza claims good but not perfect win rates against each, but concedes that those vendors (especially Oracle) of course get other deals Netezza never sees.
• Netezza characterizes Teradata as offering its multiple product lines, trying to upsell many customers from cheaper to more expensive product lines, and being selectively aggressive about pricing. None of this is surprising to me.
• 80% of Netezza’s Q1 revenue, and perhaps even a higher fraction of new-name accounts, was in four vertical markets: “Digital media,” telecom, government, and financial services.
• Some time over the next few months, Netezza will give at least some more clarity about future products.

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.

Greenplum blogs about some customers

I’ve written some about Greenplum’s customers at eBay and Fox Interactive Media.  But as I recently grumped, I’m not in the mood right now to write much about other Greenplum customers.  Fortunately, Greenplum has filled the gap itself.  Marketing chief Paul Salazar just blogged about a number of other big Greenplum customers. And last month Paul blogged in considerable detail about what he characterizes as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) conversion — Oracle replacement — at a large pharmaceutical company.

Oracle’s hardware strategy

Larry Ellison stated clearly in an email interview with Reuters (links here and here) that Oracle intends to keep Sun’s hardware business and indeed intends to invest in the SPARC chip. Naturally, I have a few thoughts about this.

As Stephen O’Grady points out, Sun’s main strength lay in selling to the large enterprise market. Well, that’s Oracle’s overwhelming focus too. As I noted two years ago:

One Oracle response is to provide lots of add-on technologies for high-end customers, on the database and middle tiers alike. In app servers it’s done surprisingly well against BEA. It’s sold a lot of clustering. And it’s bought into and tried to popularize niche technologies like TimesTen and Tangosol’s.

This all makes perfect sense – it’s a great fit for Oracle’s best customers, and a way to get thousands of extra dollars per server from enterprises that may already have bought all-you-can-eat licenses to the Oracle DBMS. And being so sensible, it fits into the Clayton Christensen disruption story in two ways:

1. Oracle may be helpless against mid-tier competition, but it sure has the high-end core of its market locked up.

2. As one type of technology is commoditized, value is created in other parts of the technology stack.

Oracle’s ongoing acquisition spree in system software, application software, and now hardware just supports that story. MySQL, embedded Java, and so on may be welcome to Oracle as yet more opportunities to tap additional markets — but Oracle’s emphasis is and surely will remain on the large enterprise market.

The next notable point may be found in Larry’s key quote: Read more

IBM’s Oracle emulation strategy reconsidered

I’ve now had a chance to talk with IBM about its recently-announced Oracle emulation strategy for DB2. (This is for DB2 9.7, which I gather has been quasi-announced in April, will be re-announced in May, and will be re-re-announced as being in general availability in June.)

Key points include:

• This really is more like Oracle emulation than it is transparency, a term I carelessly used before.
• IBM’s Oracle emulation effort is focused on two technological goals:
  • Making it easy for an Oracle application to be ported to DB2.
  • Making it easy for an Oracle developer to develop for DB2.
• The initial target market for DB2’s Oracle emulation is ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) much more than it is enterprises. IBM suggested there were a couple hundred early adopters, and those are primarily in the ISV area.

Because of Oracle’s market share, many ISVs focus on Oracle as the underlying database management system for their applications, whether or not they actually resell it along with their own software. IBM proposed three reasons why such ISVs might want to support DB2:

Read more

DBMS transparency layers never seem to sell well

A DBMS transparency layer, roughly speaking, is software that makes things that are written for one brand of database management system run unaltered on another.* These never seem to sell well. ANTs has failed in a couple of product strategies. EnterpriseDB’s Oracle compatibility only seems to have netted it a few sales, and only a small fraction of its total business. ParAccel’s and Dataupia’s transparency strategies have produced even less.

*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.

Read more

MySQL storage engine round-up, with Oracle-related thoughts

Here’s what I know about MySQL storage engines, more or less.

• MySQL with MyISAM is fast. But it’s not transactional. Except for limited purposes, MySQL with MyISAM is a pretty crummy DBMS.  Nothing can change that.
• MySQL with InnoDB is transactional. But it’s not particularly fast. MySQL with InnoDB is a pretty mediocre DBMS.  Oracle could fix that, at least partially, over time.
• I don’t know much about Falcon, Maria, and so on. With Oracle winding up owning both MySQL and InnoDB, the motivation for those engines (except as Oracle-free forks) might fade.
• Infobright is the most established of the rest. At the moment I’m not recommending it for most industrial-strength uses unless the user is particularly cash-constrained. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that changed soon.  A cheap, fast, simple columnar analytic DBMS has a place in the world.
• Kickfire is next in line, offering a hardware-based growth path for users who’ve maxed out on what unaided MySQL can do.  It remains to be seen for how many users the desire to keep things simple and stay with MySQL outweighs the desire to avoid custom hardware.  Having Oracle salespeople all over those accounts surely wouldn’t help. Kickfire also has a second market, namely OEM vendors who are mainly interested in the superfast chip. That would probably be pretty unaffected by Oracle.
• Tokutek offers a technical proposition that’s hard to match head-on without going the CEP route.  Users who care are likely to be MySQL shops.  Tokutek’s main challenge is to prove that it sufficiently outdoes competing technical strategies for sufficiently many users. Oracle ownership of MySQL seems pretty irrelevant to Tokutek’s success or failure.
• Calpont offers a kind of lightweight Exadata alternative.  With Calpont’s packaging and positioning perennially unclear, it’s difficult to predict the effect of a particular change — i.e., Oracle buying MySQL — in Calpont’s market environment.
• I haven’t heard from transactionally-oriented ScaleDB since I wrote about them a year ago.  Apparently, they’re rolling out beta product this week, and their venerable techie guru sadly passed away earlier this month.

Should the Oracle/MySQL combo face antitrust opposition?

Oracle is a powerhouse in database management systems, but it’s hardly a monopolist. IBM revels in contriving figures that show it to have market share comparable to Oracle’s, and Microsoft has a very solid position as well.  Smaller players like Teradata, Sybase, and MySQL are also thriving. And of course there’s a whole wave of newer DBMS companies, from Netezza on, showing that the DBMS industry isn’t even the secure oligopoly it appeared to be earlier this decade.

However, it’s certainly legitimate to define a product category of “real” DBMS that includes everything from MySQL on up, but not Microsoft Access and other low-end data management products.  In that universe, while MySQL is a trivial addition to Oracle’s revenue, it’s a huge increment to Oracle’s unit market share.  A merged Oracle/MySQL will dwarf the competition in ways that Oracle or MySQL alone don’t.  Read more

First thoughts on Oracle acquiring Sun

• Wow.
• And during the week of the MySQL conference, too.
• In the must-read slide presentation, Oracle’s says all the right things about being committed to all product lines and technologies. On the whole, this is believable.
• Oracle says it’s focusing Sun hardware sales on existing Oracle/Sun customers. Makes sense.
• Oracle mentions OpenStorage prominently. Makes sense. Integrating DBMS with storage is Oracle’s high-end DBMS future.  (E.g., Exadata.)
• HP can’t be happy.
• MySQL and InnoDB are reunited.
• MySQL is apt to get decent, much as it would have under IBM.
• Even so, if you really believe in open source’s freedom, it’s time to look at PostgreSQL …
• … or EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus, although my recent dealings with EnterpriseDB underscore the importance of being VERY careful about counting your fingers after you shake hands with that company.
• And I wouldn’t be surprised if another shoe dropped soon on the EnterpriseDB front. (Please excuse the mixed metaphor.)
• I used to laugh at how many different app servers Sun had acquired. Oracle acquired a number too.  Together it’s quite a pile of them.
• Oracle says acquiring Java is a great big deal. I’m not sure I see why that would really be true.

More later.  I have a radio interview in a few minutes on a very different subject.

Ingres update

I talked with Ingres today. Much of the call was fluff — open-source rah-rah, plus some numbers showing purported success, but so finely parsed as to be pretty meaningless. (To Ingres’ credit, they did offer to let me talk w/ their CFO, even if they offered no promises as to whether he’d offer any more substantive information.) Highlights included:

Read more

Why should anybody worry about Oracle’s tweaks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Internet News offers an overview of how Oracle’s own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux does or doesn’t different from generic RHEL. The defining example appears to be an alternate file system that Oracle finds useful, but Red Hat doesn’t want to bother offering. (Oracle says it donates all extensions back to the community, putting the onus on the community whether or not to use them in Linux versions other than Oracle’s.) The question is:

Does this count as an Oracle fork of (Red Hat Enterprise) Linux or doesn’t it?

My answer is:

Who cares? Read more

Oracle introduces a half-rack version of Exadata

Oracle has introduced what amounts to a half-rack Exadata machine. My thoughts on this basically boil down to “makes sense” and “no big deal.” Specifically:

• The new Baby Exadata still holds 10 terabytes or more.
• Most specialty analytic DBMS purchases are still for databases of 10 terabytes or smaller.
• Large enterprise data warehouse projects are often being deferred or cut back due to the economic crunch, but smaller projects with credible, quick ROIs are doing fine.
• Exadata is evidently being sold overwhelmingly to Oracle loyalists. Other analytic DBMS vendors aren’t telling me of serious Exadata competition yet. If the market for Exadata is primarily “happy Oracle data warehouse users”, that’s mainly folks who have <5-10 terabytes of user data today.
• Oracle Exadata beta tests were done on a kind of half-rack configuration anyway.

Notes from the Oracle conference call

Chris Karnacus reports two tidbits from the Oracle conference call:

• Oracle 11g R2 will feature an easier to administer RAC.
• Oracle insists Exadata’s sales pipeline is outstanding.  It didn’t comment on actual Exadata sales, however.

Seeking Alpha, as usual, has a full transcript, some typos aside.  There were plenty of comments on other sales, just not Exadata ones. On the other hand, Oracle execs did repeat several times how wonderful they think Exadata is.

One question about the transcript — it sort of reads like there was a big text-oriented deal at Bank of America, but there’s clearly a typo in the reference.  Does anybody who actually listened to the call know for sure whether that’s what was said? (Edit: Answered in the comments below.)

Data warehousing business trends

I’ve talked with a whole lot of vendors recently, some here at TDWI, as well as users, fellow analysts, and so on. Repeated themes include:

Read more

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

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.

Winter Corporation on Exadata

The most ridiculous analyst study I can recall — at least since Aberdeen pulled back from the “You pay; we say” business — is Winter Corporation’s list of large data warehouses. (Failings include that it only lists warehouses run by software from certain vendors; it doesn’t even list most of the largest warehouses from those vendors; and its size metrics are in my opinion fried.) So it was with some trepidation that I approached what appears to be an Oracle-sponsored Winter Corporation white paper about Exadata.* Read more

Oracle Exadata article — up at last

I’d been promising Intelligent Enterprise editor Doug Henschen an article on Oracle Exadata for months. It’s finally up.  For a variety of reasons, it was a lot more work than one might at first guess.  One such reason is that it spawned four related blog posts over the past few days.

As I post this, there are two glitches in the article. One is that em dashes are appearing as quote marks — and as you know, I use a lot of em dashes. The other is that one sentence on in-database data mining seems unclear to me, and I’ve asked for a small edit to make it clearer what I’m talking about.  No doubt both will be cleared up soon. Edit:  Doug indeed fixed all that within minutes.

This is an edited article.  Other than columns, it may be my first such since the Upside Magazine cover story on AOL over a decade ago. But it was edited with a light and skillful touch. Please don’t hold me responsible for every minor subtlety of emphasis or grammatical nuance.  But otherwise I stand behind the opinions, for they are indeed mine.

One vendor’s trash is another’s treasure

A few months ago, CEO Mayank Bawa of Aster Data commented to me on his surprise at how “profound” the relationship was between design choices in one aspect of a data warehouse DBMS and choices in other parts. The word choice in that was all Mayank, but the underlying thought is one I’ve long shared, and that I’m certain architects of many analytic DBMS share as well.

For that matter, the observation is no doubt true in many other product categories as well. But in the analytic database management arena, where there are literally 10-20+ competitors with different, non-stupid approaches, it seems most particularly valid. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Read more

Oracle says they do onsite Exadata POCs after all

When I first asked Oracle about Netezza’s claim that Oracle doesn’t do onsite Exadata POCs, they blew off the question. Then I showed Oracle an article draft saying they don’t do onsite Exadata proofs-of-concept. At that point, Oracle denied Netezza’s claim, and told me there indeed have been onsite Exadata POCs.  Oracle has not yet been able to provide me with any actual examples of same, but perhaps that will change soon.  In the mean time, I continue with the assumption that Oracle is, at best, reluctant to do Exadata POCs at customer sites.

I do understand multiple reasons for vendors to prefer POCs be done on their own sites, both innocent (cost) and nefarious (excessive degrees of control). Read more

More Oracle notes

When I went to Oracle in October, the main purpose of the visit was to discuss Exadata. And so my initial post based on the visit was focused accordingly. But there were a number of other interesting points I’ve never gotten around to writing up. Let me now remedy that, at least in part.

Read more

Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence

A few days ago I tore into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS.  Well, the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms is out too. (Link here.  Last year’s here. Hat tip for both to Doug Henschen.)  Unlike the data warehouse MQ, Gartner’s BI MQ clusters its “Leaders” together tightly. But while less bold, the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant’s claims are just as questionable as those in data warehousing.

Of course, some parts do make sense.  E.g.: Read more

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

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

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:

• MapReduce – controversial or in some cases even disappointing though it may be – has a lot of use cases.
• It’s early days, but Netezza and Teradata (and others) are beefing up their geospatial analytic capabilities.
• Memory-centric analytics is in the spotlight.

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

Beyond query

I sometimes describe database management systems as “big SQL interpreters,” because that’s the core of what they do. But it’s not all they do, which is why I describe them as “electronic file clerks” too. File clerks don’t just store and fetch data; they also put a lot of work into neatening, culling, and generally managing the health of their information hoards.

Already 15 years ago, online backup was as big a competitive differentiator in the database wars as any particular SQL execution feature. Security became important in some market segments. Reliability and availability have been important from the getgo. And manageability has been crucial ever since Microsoft lapped Oracle in that regard, back when SQL Server had little else to recommend it except price.*

*Before Oracle10g, the SQL Server vs. Oracle manageability gap was big.

Now data warehousing is demanding the same kinds of infrastructure richness.*

Read more

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