Teradata

Analysis of data warehousing giant Teradata. Related subjects include:

October 30, 2009

Aster Data 4.0 and the evolution of “advanced analytic(s) servers”

Since Linda and I are leaving on vacation in a few hours, Aster Data graciously gave me permission to morph its “12:01 am Monday, November 2” embargo into “late Friday night.”

Aster Data is officially announcing the 4.0 release of nCluster. There are two big pieces to this announcement:

In addition, Aster has matured nCluster in various ways, for example cleaning up a performance problem with single-row updates.

Highlights of the Aster “Data-Application Server” story include: Read more

October 27, 2009

Teradata’s nebulous cloud strategy

As the pun goes, Teradata’s cloud strategy is – well, it’s somewhat nebulous. More precisely, for the foreseeable future, Teradata’s cloud strategy is a collection of rather disjointed parts, including:

Teradata openly admits that its direction is heavily influenced by Oliver Ratzesberger at eBay. Like Teradata, Oliver and eBay favor virtual data marts over physical ones. That is, Oliver and eBay believe that the ideal scenario is that every piece of data is only stored once, in an integrated Teradata warehouse. But eBay believes and Teradata increasingly agrees that users need a great deal of control over their use of this data, including the ability to import additional data into private sandboxes, and join it to the warehouse data already there. Read more

October 25, 2009

Teradata hardware strategy and tactics

In my opinion, the most important takeaways about Teradata’s hardware strategy from the Teradata Partners conference last week are:

In addition, some non-SSD componentry tidbits from Carson Schmidt include:

Let’s get back now to SSDs, because over the next few years they’re the potential game-changer. Read more

October 25, 2009

Reports of perfectly-balanced hardware configurations are greatly exaggerated

Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:

What’s more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse’s workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the “ideal” hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user’s “ideal” configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be “ideally balanced” for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.

October 19, 2009

This week at the Teradata Partners user conference

Teradata tells me that its press embargoes are ending at 9:00 this morning. Here are some highlights of what’s going on, although names, dates, and details will have to await conversations and press releases this week.

October 6, 2009

Oracle Exadata customers presenting at Oracle Open World

Greg Rahn tweeted a list of Exadata-focused sessions at Oracle Open World next week. As Oracle employees and supporters have been foreshadowing, there will be Exadata users and user-like folks presenting. I identified what look like half a dozen (not counting any who, for example, will make surprise appearances at keynote addresses), specifically: Read more

October 5, 2009

Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Summary of Oracle Exadata 2 capacity pricing

Analyzing Oracle Exadata pricing is always harder than one would first think. But I’ve finally gotten around to doing an Oracle Exadata 2 pricing spreadsheet. The main takeaways are:

Longer version

When Oracle introduced Exadata last year it was, well, expensive. Exadata 2 has now been announced, and it is significantly cheaper than Exadata 1 per terabyte of user data, based on:

Read more

September 3, 2009

Teradata really means that those 100+ appliances are in PRODUCTION

I was misremembering.  It turns out that when Teradata said it had over 100 appliances “in production”, it meant that >100 hardware-based appliances are actually in production. If you add in the software-only “appliances,” and count test/development as well as true production, the total rises to >200.

I tried to get a finer breakdown out of Teradata on a disclosable basis, but failed. The ostensible reason is that public companies often don’t do that sort of thing without permission from the investor relations department, and Teradata’s marketers evidently haven’t felt a sense of urgency about getting permission to, for example, communicate how well just the 25xx series is doing.

September 3, 2009

Teradata and Netezza are doing MapReduce too

Netezza told me a while ago that it planned to introduce MapReduce, and agreed yesterday this was no longer NDAed. Stephen Brobst of Teradata* let slip at XLDB that Teradata has MapReduce too, apparently implemented but not yet generally available.

I don’t have details in either case.  Netezza and Teradata evidently aren’t taking MapReduce as seriously as Aster Data, or even Greenplum or Vertica. But MapReduce has become pretty much of a “checkmark” item for large-database analytic DBMS vendors even so.

*Technically, Brobst is not and never has been a Teradata employee — but he’s widely and correctly regarded as being “of Teradata” even so. :)

September 2, 2009

Teradata has over 100 appliances in production

I recently wrote that Teradata had gotten serious about appliance product lines, and had non-trivial sales figures for them. In a press release today, Teradata is now explicitly saying (emphasis mine):

Teradata now has more than 100 appliances in production, including the Data Mart Appliance 551, the Data Warehouse Appliance 2550, and the Extreme Data Appliance 1550, which complement the core platform, the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5550.

The breakdowns on that are NDA, and anyhow I can’t find them immediately in my notes.* But if memory serves — while a lot of those appliances are used for test and development, a whole other lot of them are used to do actual production query-answering work. (Edit: Memory turned out to be wrong.) Read more

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