• Vertica had a “killer” Q4 and is doing very well in Q1 again.
• Vertica burned hardly any cash last year; i.e., it was close to cash-flow neutral in 2009.
• Vertica is hiring aggressively, e.g., in sales.
• Vertica is well down the path with several CEO candidates who Jerry regards as outstanding. He is hopeful there will be a new CEO in April. (But I bet that would be late April, given what Jerry mentioned about his own travel plans.)
• Absent a full-time CEO, Jerry and Andy Palmer are spending a lot more time with Vertica.
• One Vertica customer is approaching a petabyte of user data. The last time Vertica had checked, that customer had been more in the ¼ petabyte range.
• Other multi-hundred terabyte Vertica databases were mentioned, including one where Vertica claims to have beaten Teradata and perhaps other competitors in a head-to-head competition (it sounds like that one’s too recent to be deployed yet).
• Vertica sees Aster and Greenplum competitively more often than it sees ParAccel.
• Vertica sees Sybase IQ competitively a lot in financial services (in new-name accounts for Sybase as well as where some kind of Sybase DBMS is an incumbent), and more occasionally in other sectors.

NDA parts of the conversation also gave me the impression that Vertica is moving forward just as eagerly as it’s peers. I.e., I didn’t uncover any reason to think that Ralph’s departure is a sign of trouble, of the company being shopped, etc.

On the other hand, I didn’t uncover any other clear reason for Ralph’s departure either. The party line is that Ralph left for “personal reasons”. It was his decision to leave. He did a great job while at Vertica. Basically, Vertica is saying that, even though all was going swimmingly, Ralph just up and quit, leaving some very valuable unvested stock options on the table at what had been his first CEO gig ever.

Contacting Ralph didn’t add any immediate insight. He responded quickly via a Twitter DM, but was in the airport for a trip to his home country of South Africa, and deferred discussion until after his return.

Incidentally, Infobright and ParAccel have both also had recent CEO turnover. Stated reasons in each case were of the “Right person to lead the next stage of the company’s growth” variety.

• One of the most confusing things about Sybase ASE is its version numbering. In particular,
  • Sybase ASE 15.5 went GA in December, 2009. (But the clustered version is just coming out in March.)
  • The prior version of Sybase ASE was 15.03.
  • Sybase ASE 15.0 came out in September, 2005.
  • The version of Sybase ASE before that was 12.5.
  • And by the way, Sybase System 10 came out in 1994 or so.
• Sybase ASE 15.0 was a major rewrite. In particular, Sybase ASE 15.0 had a “brand new” optimizer and query processing engine, based on the Volcano model. The main driver of the rewrite was to make Sybase ASE suitable for mixing OLTP and some level of decision-support workloads. (Not on the order of what Sybase IQ can handle, but at least operational reporting and so on.)
• I haven’t looked up Volcano in more detail than to confirm that what I thought Raj said made sense, but as he characterized it, it’s a lot more modular than what Sybase had in ASE 12.5. For example, substantially the only join algorithm in Sybase ASE 12.5 was nested loop – no hash or sort/merge.
• As you might imagine, a lot of things one might regard as core modern DBMS features were only added to Sybase ASE once 15.0 came out. Examples include:
  • Various forms of partitioning at the storage level.
  • User-defined functions (UDFs).
  • A clustering offering that competes with Oracle RAC. (100 or so customers are on that so far.) Absent clustering, Sybase ASE is limited to a single SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) box.
  • Shared disk. Amazingly, it seems that before 2008, every node in an SMP box running Sybase ASE had its own private partition (maybe not the right word) of data.
• In Sybase ASE, you have lots of databases managed by one database server. You can write SQL statements that span multiple databases, but they have to reference database names as well as table names.
• There are several ways to get data from one place to another in Sybase’s technology and nomenclature, specifically including. Replication Server, Incremental Data Transfer, and “proxy tables.” (Other than the fact that Replication Server is a separate, chargeable product, I don’t really have these straight.) In addition, there’s a hand-coded one in Sybase RAP, which will get a planned 5-6X performance improvement later this year when it is replaced by Incremental Data Transfer.

And in what basically sounds like a very cool approach, Sybase ASE has a lot of memory-centric aspects. That said, Sybase’s in-memory ASE story is still incomplete (wait until the next release) and confused (I think in part because of what’s missing in the current release).  Also, this is one area where the non-technical nature of the briefing got in my way. So here’s some of what I do and don’t know about Sybase’s memory-centric ASE strategy:

• Sybase lets you mix and match on-disk and in-memory databases under one instance of Sybase ASE. To a programmer, it all looks like ASE.
• I don’t know exactly what the limitations are on what you can do with in-memory databases, how you can use them in tandem with on-disk databases, etc.
• You can replicate data from disk to an in-memory Sybase ASE database today. (Hello caching, ala Oracle Times Ten or IBM DB2/solidDB.)
• Replicating from memory to disk is a near-term future capability. (So Sybase does not yet have a hybrid memory-centric story ala solidDB Classic.)
• I have no clue as to what kinds of in-memory data structures Sybase ASE uses.

*Links to Gartner Magic Quadrants commonly break, but that one worked at the time of this posting.

• Gartner thinks that data warehouse appliances are on the rise, due to their simplicity.
• Gartner correctly says that Teradata has been a data warehouse appliance vendor from the getgo.
• Gartner characterizes IBM as being an appliance vendor as well.
• Gartner suggests that HP is having trouble living up to its technical promises for Neoview.
• Gartner further suggests — no surprise here — that HP Neoview has had very few new customers past its initial wave.
• Gartner notes IBM’s difficulties in selling data warehouse installations of DB2, despite what on paper is great-sounding technology.
• Gartner says — also no surprise — that illuminate “has seen little success in North America since opening its first office in the U.S. over two years ago.”
• Ingres has evidently gotten a few BI-centric “appliance” deals, e.g. with Jaspersoft. But basically Ingres isn’t doing well in data warehousing.
• Gartner does say Ingres has “the strongest open-source DBMS offering for data warehousing.” Being very literal about “open source,” that’s a defensible claim — but it’s pretty irrelevant in a world where Greenplum Single-Node Edition can be had for free. It also waves away all the data mart use cases in which Infobright Community Edition shines.
• Gartner says that Netezza is working out as a “complex workload” enterprise data warehouse provider, according to reference checks, in addition to its established success in data mart scenarios.
• Gartner says Oracle’s offering has finally become “accepted” in the market for databases >50 TB. I guess I can live with that fairly weak claim, but I wouldn’t go much further than that.
• Gartner asserts that, unlike software-only Oracle, Oracle Exadata isn’t significantly harder to administer than “other mixed OLTP/OLAP DBMS vendors,” because Exadata is fast enough you don’t need to jump through all those hoops any more to get tolerable performance. The money quote is “one reference reported reducing the number of indexes by a factor of 100 to fewer than five.” Note, however, that Gartner does not seem to assert that Exadata’s ease of use rivals that of the newer analytic DBMS specialists.
• Gartner confirms Oracle’s reluctance to do onsite Exadata POCs, but says it is not absolute. This is roughly compatible with what I’m hearing elsewhere, and indeed with Oracle own claims to be ramping up availability of Exadata POC hardware.
• Gartner’s criteria for inclusion include at least 10 different organizations having a product “in production.” Thus, the big surprise was ParAccel being included. The money quote there is “With approximately 20 customers in the pharmaceutical, retail, financial and media/advertising analytics sectors, ParAccel has a good reference base.” That assessment is difficult to reconcile with other information, but I’ve been told Gartner is sticking to its guns. That assessment would be even harder to believe if those 20 references were all alleged to be true production customers.
• Gartner notes that you basically can’t run a 1 TB+ MySQL data warehouse without sharding. (Of course, Infobright has an alternative, and up to a small number of terabytes so does Kickfire.)
• Gartner reports that at least some customers are pleased with Sybase IQ’s mixed workload/enterprise data warehouse capabilities.
• Gartner correctly notes that Oracle Exadata is a price-competition challenge for Teradata.
• Gartner notes that 20% of Vertica’s customers are outside the US. While not shocking, that’s more than I realized.
• Gartner notes something I don’t think I’ve posted yet, which is that Vertica has a customer with 300 TB of data. (The identity is a deep dark secret, but if I told you you probably wouldn’t recognize the name anyway.)

As does any such piece, the Gartner Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant also has outright errors.  For example:

• Aster Data isn’t really “the newest entrant to the DBMS data warehouse world.”
• Aster’s SQL/MapReduce was not new in Release 4.0.
• Greenplum isn’t yet pushing down code to the storage tier.
• I’m not sure what kind of database-tier parallelism Gartner is claiming is new in Oracle in 11g Release 2 — but I doubt it’s really new. Rather, what Oracle has done recently is make parallelism less administratively cumbersome.
• Vertica wasn’t really the first DBMS in the cloud. At most it was the first pure-play analytic DBMS to get there.

To understand Sybase’s plans for Aleri and CEP, it helps to understand Sybase’s current CEP-oriented offering, Sybase RAP. So far as I can tell, Sybase RAP has to date only been sold in the form of Sybase RAP: The Trading Edition. In that guise, Sybase RAP has been sold to >40 outfits since its May, 2008 launch, mainly big names in the investment banking and stock exchange sectors. If I understood correctly, the next target market for Sybase RAP is telcos, for real-time network tuning and management.

In addition to any domain-specific applications, Sybase RAP has three layers:

• CEP (Complex Event Processing). Sybase RAP CEP is based on a version of the Coral8 engine Sybase licensed and has been subsequently developing.
• In-memory DBMS. Sybase’s IMDB is part of (but I guess separable from) and has the same API as Sybase’s OLTP DBMS Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE, aka Sybase Classic).
• Sybase IQ. Actually, Sybase used the phrase “based on Sybase IQ,” but I’m guessing it’s just Sybase IQ.

In theory, there could be a DBMS other than Sybase IQ, such as Sybase ASE or even Oracle, because Sybase IMDB can talk to a variety of DBMS. I didn’t get the impression, however, that in practice there were any Sybase RAP installations whose persistent DBMS was anything other than Sybase IQ.

Aleri had all along had something called Project Ohio, to merge Coral8 with Aleri Classic. Now Sybase’s own CEP engineering team is being added to the mix, schedules are being reconsidered and haven’t been disclosed yet. (If one woman can produce one baby in nine months, how long does it take nine women to produce a baby?) Apparently Sybase has a dozen programmers in the CEP area, plus ~20 more on Sybase RAP, not counting QA, documentation, etc.; that represents a significant bump to the overall Aleri development team.

Sybase doesn’t seem to have decided what to do yet with the various business intelligence/real-time OLAP engine products and technologies it is inheriting from Aleri.

And finally, some metrics:

• The Sybase/Aleri guys estimate that 1/3 of of Aleri’s customers and even less of its revenue came from outside the financial services sector. They did say the non-financial-services business was “starting to pick up,” but not very convincingly.
• Sybase IQ is now up to >1800 customers, with >200 new ones in 2009.
• Sybase IQ indeed has users taking in market feeds up to 3 terabytes a day, so it probably matches Vertica in having at least several-hundred-terabyte databases in the financial sector.

• The folks at Sybase still haven’t figured out when to prebrief me. (Edit: I’ve been briefed subsequently.)
• Sybase/Aleri is a potentially powerful combination, if they can effectively address the point I just made about integrating disparate latencies. That said, I’m not expecting a lot, because the CEP industry always disappoints me.
• Microsoft, IBM, and (somewhat less clearly) Oracle are all trying to do CEP inhouse. Sybase is making a good choice in having serious CEP inhouse itself
• Surely the main focus and financial justification for the Sybase/Aleri acquisition is the financial services market.
• Specifically, I expect the focus of technical integration between Aleri and Sybase’s DBMS products to start with Sybase IQ.
• Coral8 had some interesting ideas about how to integrate CEP with OLTP/operational BI, but I’m not aware that they got much traction.
• I bet there are use cases where Sybase tries and fails to sell Adaptive Server SQL Anywhere that CEP would be a better technical fit, but I don’t immediately see much practical business significance to that observation.
• While this deal could easily strengthen the Vertica/StreamBase partnership, I don’t see any reason why it would lead those two companies to actually merge.

Related link

• Thinking about analytic latency

If a recent Vertica press release is to be believed, Sybase got clobbered. The meat is:

…  Sybase has admitted that under the claim construction order issued by the Court on November 9, 2009, “Vertica does not infringe Claims 1-15 of U.S. Patent No. 5,794,229.” Sybase further acknowledged that because the Court ruled that all the remaining claims in the patent (claims 16-24) were invalid, “Sybase cannot prevail on those claims.”

For those counting along at home — the patent only has 24 claims in total.

I have no idea whether Sybase can still cobble together grounds for appeal, or claims under some other patent. But for now, this sounds like a total victory for Vertica.

Edit: I’ve now seen a PDF of a filing suggesting the grounds under which Sybase will appeal. Basically, it alleges that the judge erred in defining a “page” of data too narrowly. Note that if Sybase prevails on appeal on that point, Vertica has a bunch of other defenses that haven’t been litigated yet. It further seems that Sybase may have recently filed another patent case against Vertica, in a different venue, based on a different patent.

One annoying blog troll excepted, is anybody surprised at this outcome?

• MUMPS, the original Intersystems technology, was focused on health care.
• The reasons Intersystems went object-oriented have a lot to do with the structure of health-care records.
• Intersystems’ biggest and most visible ISVs are in the health-care area.
• Intersystems is actually beginning to sell an electronic health records system called TrakCare around the world (but not in the US, where it has lots of large competitive VARs).

Note: Intersystems Cache’ is sold mainly through VARs (Value-Added Resellers), aka ISVs/OEMs. I.e., it’s sold by people who write applications on top of it.

So far as I understand – and this is still pretty vague and apt to be partially erroneous – the Intersystems Cache’ technical story goes something like this:

• Intersystems Cache’ is an object-oriented DBMS.
• The preferred language for talking to Intersystems Cache’ is Java.
• Intersystems claims Cache’ has good SQL performance, for most kinds of use-case.
• Intersystems Cache’ stores data in a kind of sparse hierarchy. It uses a lot of “common character count” compression, which sounds a lot to me like Patricia tries.
• Intersystems has recently bundled some BI/reporting tools into the Cache’ stack. Surely not coincidentally, Intersystems once told me that some of its ISVs paid more to Crystal Reports than to Intersystems.
• Intersystems Cache’ has had Sybase emulation for several years, and just added Informix emulation. Most but not all stored procedures from those other DBMS run against Cache’ as well.
• Intersystems Cache’ recently added a bunch of manageability, security, etc. features, the details of which generally inspired “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” reactions in me.
• Intersystems’ just did a revamp of the Cache’ object model to make it more Smalltalk-like, in which messages are set to parent rather than child classes when appropriate. Thus, when you recompile a class, you don’t also have to recompile all its children, and incremental recompilation is now near-instantaneous. (Put that one in the “Oh, you didn’t have that earlier?” category too.) Versioning will be better as well.
• In the latest release, Cache’ has added what Intersystems calls “Java Event Processing.” This doesn’t sound like CEP (Complex Event Processing), and I forgot to ask whether it was memory-centric at all. Anyhow, the idea is to bang objects into the database really quickly, having them be immediately available for SQL query. “Really quickly” means >10,000 objects/core/second, with one test at the European Space Agency getting up to 85,000. By way of contrast, Intersystems asserts (based on bake-offs) that RDBMS competitors have to insert into BLOBs to get competitive performance, with associated loss of queryability.

Finally, a few financial highlights:

• Intersystems did a little over $1/4 billion in revenue in 2009.
• 85% of that was Cache’.
• Revenue growth was slightly positive in 2009, and 15% in 2008.
• Headcount growth was 25% in 2009 and is planned to be big again in 2010, after being modest in prior years.

]]> http://www.dbms2.com/2010/01/15/intersystems-cache-highlights/feed/ 2 http://www.dbms2.com/2009/11/23/fabricated-press-release-quote/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/11/23/fabricated-press-release-quote/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:54:03 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.dbms2.com/?p=1250 My clients at Kickfire put out a press release last week quoting me as saying things I neither said nor believe. The press release is about a “Queen For A Day” kind of contest announced way back in April, in which users were invited to submit stories of their data warehouse problems, with the biggest sob stories winning free Kickfire appliances. The fabricated “quote” reads:

As we went through the contest entries in detail, it was readily apparent that today’s data warehousing solutions are either massively expensive or non-existent,” said Curt Monash, Founder of Monash Research. “Clearly, there is major dual-market opportunity for a product such as the Kickfire appliance that can not only provide an affordable data warehousing solution to small companies; but can also target larger companies that have made an initial investment in high-end solutions, yet still need to add some affordable query processing power in other areas of the organization.”

In reality:

• I spent a few minutes reviewing summaries of eight stories selected by Kickfire from the entrants, and emailed comments back to Kickfire about them. I have no further role to play in the contest.
• The part of the “quote” that slams Kickfire’s competitors is not reflective of my views.
• The “market opportunity” is in line with the positioning I’ve encouraged Kickfire to adopt. A good shorthand for it is the “Sybase IQ market.” In essence I see Kickfire as an interesting Sybase IQ alternative. But Sybase IQ is a formidable competitor, and there are many other competitors as well. This is hardly an untapped market ripe for Kickfire’s plucking.

I’m satisfied that this is all a case of lousy marketing execution – something Kickfire has a history of — rather than deliberate deception. Kickfire has recently turned over its VP of Marketing (twice) and PR resource (at least once). Scott Humphrey, Kickfire’s new outside PR guy, says he was incorrectly told by his predecessor that the press release and quote in question had been approved, and put it out without fact-checking. I believe him. I hope Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong will be able to add stronger marketing leadership soon. Bruce seems aware of the need, and is making reasonable marketing strategy decisions himself in the mean time, so there’s some basis for optimism.

And by the way – I don’t let vendors write press release quotes for me anyway. I let them edit in precise product names and so on, but otherwise the words are mine. The last occasion on which I recall bending this policy was inadvertent and over a year ago, when Greenplum emailed something to me — which was genuinely similar to my opinion — while I was on the phone with Aster at a particularly frenzied time, and I didn’t immediately realize the words weren’t my own.

• Sybase IQ is an analytic DBMS with a columnar/column-store architecture
• Unlike most analytic DBMS, Sybase IQ has a shared-disk architecture.
• The Sybase IQ indexing story is a bit complicated, with a bunch of different index kinds. Most are focused on columns with low cardinality, and it least in some cases are a lot like bitmaps. (Sybase IQ when first introduced was a pure bitmap index product, with a single index type “Fast Project”.) But one index kind, “High Group” — designed for columns with high cardinality – is an exception to most generalities about other Sybase IQ index kinds, and instead is more akin to a b-tree.
• Unlike Vertica, Sybase stores each column of data only once. I don’t see how it would make sense to have multiple indexes on the same column, but I didn’t actually ask whether doing so is possible or common.
• Sybase estimates that Sybase IQ requires ¼ the DBA effort of, say, Oracle. (Frankly, that’s not a particularly good figure.) Obviously, this is just a broad-brush average.
• Sybase recently repurposed an acquired ETL tool to be focused on Sybase IQ. IQ of course also works with various third-party tools, certified or otherwise.
• Sybase’s Power Designer CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering)/database design tool works with Sybase IQ.
• Sybase is proud of Sybase IQ’s new in-database analytics capabilities, but I haven’t yet grasped what, if anything, is differentiated about them.
• Sybase has an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) story built around the point that different columns can be stored on different kinds of media.

Highlights of the Sybase IQ compression story include:

• Sybase IQ applies compression to both columns and pages
• A (the?) major kind of column compression is called “projection” — why? — but boils down to token/dictionary compression. Tokens can be 1, 2, or 3 bytes or length – whichever is the best fit for the column’s cardinality.
• I don’t have details about the other kinds of compression.
• Data is kept compressed in memory “until the latest point possible.”

Highlights of the Sybase IQ update and load story include:

• Sybase claims that only the “High Group” index is costly to update. Specifically, “High Group” costs about as much to update as the database itself. Other indexes are fairly trivial to update. (Upon reflection, I don’t immediately see why that makes sense.)
• There’s pipelining of some sort when a High Group index is updated.
• Sybase claims that bulk loads of Sybase IQ are very fast.
• Loading Sybase IQ doesn’t block queries. Rather, Sybase IQ has some kind of versioning system in which a query just executes against older data.
• Sybase IQ updating is done in parallel. (That would be parallel among servers, of course, since Sybase IQ is shared-disk.)
• Trickle feed loading of Sybase IQ is slow. When you need to do microbatch loading with latency in the 2-15 minute range, Sybase recommends staging via an OLTP DBMS, whether from Sybase or otherwise. Sybase PowerDesigner generates scripts for this, and Sybase Replication Server helps with the execution.

Highlights of the Sybase IQ concurrency, scalability, and workload management story include:

• Sybase points out that, because of Sybase IQ’s shared-disk architecture, queries can execute on a single server in the “grid.” Thus, if you have enough cores, it can be possible to isolate long-running queries from shorter ones.
• Similarly, Sybase notes that you can meet different SLAs by putting different users’ queries on more- or less-crowded Sybase IQ servers.
• Sybase further observes that not having to move data among nodes saves Sybase IQ from a lot of overhead true MPP systems endure.
• Sybase makes the usual claim that, because Sybase IQ is so efficient, queries finish quickly, and hence there’s less stress on concurrency than one might otherwise think.
• I don’t get the sense that Sybase IQ actually boasts a lot of direct workload management features. However, there are such features in Sybase’s flagship ASE product, so hopefully adding something similar to Sybase IQ is a product future.

Related links

• Sybase IQ business notes

• >1500 users
• >3000 installations (Sybase has variously cited 2.1 and 2.5+ as the installation/user ratio)
• At least ~50-60 installations with >5 terabytes of user data

Note that 98% of Sybase IQ installations are under 5 terabytes; the heart of Sybase IQ’s business is the sub-terabyte data warehouse market.*

*Unlike most other analytic DBMS startups, Kickfire seems to be increasingly pursuing. that market too.

Sybase IQ was traditionally sold mainly to users of Sybase’s core Adaptive Server Enterprise DBMS (whether or not they ran other DBMS such as Oracle as well). Sybase recently has become more aggressive about selling IQ into non-Sybase shops. More generally, Sybase seems to have repositioned IQ in 2005, decided it liked the results, and ramped up investment in Sybase IQ as of 2006.

The way Sybase breaks down its different target markets is somewhat confusing, but so far as I can tell:

• A whole lot of Sybase IQ installations are focused on straight reporting.
• Sybase is beefing up its efforts and penetration for IQ in “advanced analytics.” How advanced that is to date is a little unclear.
• Sybase claims 80-90+ Sybase IQ customers in the “data aggregator” business, counting fairly narrowly.
• Financial services is, unsurprisingly, a special-case market of particular focus.

Sybase IQ pricing is traditionally complicated; perhaps one of these months Sybase will clarify it for me. The latest iteration appears to be mainly per-core, but I don’t have a good sense for what kinds of workloads can be handled by what number of cores.

Related links

• Sybase IQ technical highlights

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