Rainstor

Analysis of Rainstor (formerly known as Clearpace) and its database archiving product NParchive. Related subjects include:

September 22, 2011

Teradata Columnar and Teradata 14 compression

Teradata is pre-announcing Teradata 14, for delivery by the end of this year, where by “Teradata 14” I mean the latest version of the DBMS that drives the classic Teradata product line. Teradata 14’s flagship feature is Teradata Columnar, a hybrid-columnar offering that follows in the footsteps of Greenplum (now part of EMC) and Aster Data (now part of Teradata).

The basic idea of Teradata Columnar is:

Read more

July 5, 2011

Eight kinds of analytic database (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I outlined four variants on the traditional enterprise data warehouse/data mart dichotomy, and suggested what kinds of DBMS products you might use for each. In Part 2 I’ll cover four more kinds of analytic database — even newer, for the most part, with a use case/product short list match that is even less clear.  Read more

June 11, 2010

Rainstor update

I was tired and cranky when I talked with my former clients at Rainstor (formerly Clearpace) yesterday, so our call was shorter than it otherwise might have been. Anyhow, there’s a new version called Rainstor 4, the two main themes of which are:

The point is that Rainstor is focusing its efforts on enterprises that:  Read more

December 30, 2009

More miscellany

Adding to yesterday’s varied quick comments: Read more

December 11, 2009

Notes on RainStor, the company formerly known as Clearpace

Information preservation* DBMS vendor Clearpace officially changed its name to RainStor this week. RainStor is also relocating its CEO John Bantleman and more generally its headquarters to San Francisco. This all led to a visit with John and his colleague Ramon Chen, highlights of which included: Read more

May 14, 2009

The secret sauce to Clearpace’s compression

In an introduction to archiving vendor Clearpace last December, I noted that Clearpace claimed huge compression successes for its NParchive product (Clearpace likes to use a figure of 40X), but didn’t give much reason that NParchive could compress a lot more effectively than other columnar DBMS. Let me now follow up on that.

To the extent there’s a Clearpace secret sauce, it seems to lie in NParchive’s unusual data access method.  NParchive doesn’t just tokenize the values in individual columns; it tokenizes multi-column fragments of rows.  Which particular columns to group together in that way seems to be decided automagically; the obvious guess is that this is based on estimates of the cardinality of their Cartesian products.

Of the top of my head, examples for which this strategy might be particularly successful include:

December 16, 2008

Database archiving and information preservation

Two similar companies reached out to me recently – SAND Technology and Clearpace. Their current market focus is somewhat different: Clearpace talks mainly of archiving, and sells first and foremost into the compliance market, while SAND has the most traction providing “near-line” storage for SAP databases.* But both stories boil down to pretty much the same thing: Cheap, trustworthy data storage with good-enough query capabilities. E.g., I think both companies would agree the following is a not-too-misleading first-approximation characterization of their respective products:

Read more

December 16, 2008

Introduction to Clearpace

Clearpace is a UK-based startup in a similar market to what SAND Technology has gotten into – DBMS archiving, with a strong focus on compression and general cost-effectiveness. Clearpace launched its product NParchive a couple of quarters ago, and says it now has 25 people and $1 million or so in revenue. Clearpace NParchive technical highlights include: Read more

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