Are analytic DBMS vendors overcomplicating their interconnect architectures?
I don’t usually spend a lot of time researching Ethernet switches. But I do think a lot about high-end data warehousing, and as I noted back in July, networking performance is a big challenge there. Among the very-large-scale MPP data warehouse software vendors, Greenplum is unusual in that its interconnect of choice is (sufficiently many) cheap 1 gigabit Ethernet switches.
A recent Network World story suggested that Greenplum wasn’t alone in this preference; other people also feel that clusters of commodity 1 gigabit Ethernet switches can be superior to higher-performing ones. So I pinged CTO Luke Lonergan of Greenplum for more comment. His response, which I got permission to publish, was: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Parallelization | 4 Comments |
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:
- Many Teradata users are buying newer technology too. But they aren’t actually throwing out Teradata.
- The same sometimes applies to Netezza already. At least two Netezza references are also references for a rival vendor.
- One outfit is among the biggest customers for two different analytic DBMS vendors, neither of which is Teradata or Netezza.
- One corporation is using or deploying four different brands of analytic DBMS.
- TEOCO is a big user of both DATAllegro and Netezza.
Vertica’s paying customer count
In a recent Computerworld article, Andy Ellicott of Vertica was cited as saying Vertica has 50 paying customers total. That’s very much on par with Greenplum’s figure, leaving aside any questions of deal size. (Greenplum runs a number of databases much larger than Vertica’s biggest. However, I believe Greenplum also charges a lot less per terabyte of user data.)
Previous Vertica paying customer count figures include:
| Categories: Data warehousing, Greenplum, Vertica Systems | 8 Comments |
Three approaches to parallelizing data transformation
Many MPP data warehousing vendors have told me their products are used for ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) instead of ETL (Extract/Transform/Load). I.e., needed data transformations are done on the MPP system, rather than on the — probably SMP — system the data comes from.* If the data transformation is being applied on a record-by-record basis, then it’s automatically fully parallelized. Even if the transforms are more complex, considerable parallel processing may still be going on.
*Or it’s some of each, at which point it’s called ETLT — I bet you can work out what that stands for.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, MapReduce, Parallelization, Pervasive Software | 8 Comments |
MapReduce sound bites
Last Thursday, both Greenplum and Aster Data — the two most recent of my numerous data warehouse specialist customers — both told me of the same major innovation. Both were rushing to announce it first, before anybody else did. This led to considerable tap dancing, with the upshot being that both are releasing the information tonight or tomorrow morning.
What’s going on is that Aster Data and Greenplum have both integrated MapReduce into their respective MPP shared-nothing data warehouse DBMS. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Aster Data, Greenplum, MapReduce, Parallelization | 11 Comments |
Greenplum’s single biggest customer
Greenplum offered a bit of clarification regarding the usage figures I posted last night. Everything on the list is in production, except that:
- One Greenplum customer is at 400 terabytes now, and upgrading to >1 petabyte “as we speak.”
- Greenplum’s other soon-to-be >1 petabyte customer isn’t in production yet. (Greenplum previously told me that customer was in the process of loading data right now.)
| Categories: Data warehousing, Fox and MySpace, Greenplum, Petabyte-scale data management, Specific users | 3 Comments |
Greenplum is in the big leagues
After a March, 2007 call, I didn’t talk again with Greenplum until earlier this month. That changed fast. I flew out to see Greenplum last week and spent over a day with president/co-founder Scott Yara, CTO/co-founder Luke Lonergan, marketing VP Paul Salazar, and product management/marketing director Ben Werther. Highlights – besides some really great sushi at Sakae in Burlingame – start with an eye-opening set of customer proof points, such as: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Petabyte-scale data management, PostgreSQL | 19 Comments |
My current customer list among the data warehouse specialists
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 data warehouse DBMS/appliance specialists in the group. They are:
- Aster Data
- Calpont
- DATAllegro
- Greenplum
- Infobright
- Netezza
- ParAccel
- Teradata
- Vertica
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.
| Categories: About this blog, Aster Data, Calpont, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Infobright, Netezza, ParAccel, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 3 Comments |
Kevin Closson doesn’t like MPP
Kevin Closson of Oracle offers a long criticism of the popularity of MPP. Key takeaways include:
- TPC-H benchmarks that show Oracle as somewhat superior to DB2 are highly significant.
- TPC-H benchmarks in which MPP vendors destroy Oracle are too unimportant to even mention.
- SMP did better than MPP the last time he was in a position to judge (which evidently was some time during the Clinton Administration), so it surely must still be superior for all purposes today.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Oracle, Parallelization | 20 Comments |
Three happy 100 terabyte-plus customers for DATAllegro
Over on my Network World blog, I asked the question “So who are DATAllegro’s actual current customers?” As regular readers know, that’s a fairly hard question to answer. TEOCO is widely known as DATAllegro’s flagship reference, but after that the list gets thin in a hurry.
As a by-the-by to other discussions, DATAllegro Stuart Frost undertook to respond in part himself. Specifically, he gave me two names of two other happy customers that are or imminently will be running DATAllegro against 100+ terabytes of user data. Read more