The Netezza Developer Network
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is: Read more
Notes from the Netezza user conference
EDIT: Big whoops, and apologies to Philip. I didn’t check the date, and what I linked to was last year’s article. That said, it read as if it could have been this year’s, which tells us something about the pace of Netezza’s information disclosure. Resulting errors of mine are left in place.
Netezza perennially annoys me by the secrecy with which it surrounds its information disclosure, especially at the annual user conference (just concluded). Essentially, except for what has also been separately disclosed, the whole thing is under NDA beyond the generality “We told you that we intend to improve our product by making more use of the FPGA.” Blech. That said, Philip Howard* has a long and — no surprise there! — upbeat article. So I’ll link to that, saving me some worries about what I myself am or am not allowed to say. E.g., I wouldn’t dare suggest — as Philip does — that Netezza’s zone maps (essentially, one-dimensional partitioning) could be enhanced going forward. And while I think Netezza has made strong efforts to tell the marketing stories Philip describes as being “hidden under a bushel,” I agree that — largely because of its self-defeating mania for secrecy — Netezza hasn’t done nearly as good a job of getting those messages accepted as it could have.
*Just to be clear — notwithstanding how much I tweak him for his exuberance, Philip seems to be a great guy, both in his publications and in person.
In general, much of what Philip wrote I would agree with. That said, let me hasten to point out some exceptions, including: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 2 Comments |
Oracle and SAP outline different market strategies
I’ve written extensively in the past about the differences between Oracle and SAP’s technical paradigms. (In a nutshell, Oracle is first and foremost about data, while SAP is about business process.) Last week, the respective companies’ CEOs outlined very different business strategies as well. Specifically, SAP’s Henning Kagermann called SAP’s new ByDemand SaaS offering “most important announcement I’ve made in my career,” while Oracle’s Larry Ellison outlined a continued high-end strategy as follows (excerpted from Oracle’s September 20 conference call transcript):
Our strategy for growth is to find a way to add more value to the same customers we already serve, which are the large end of the mid-market and large companies. What we’re doing here is moving beyond ERP to industry specific software. So in the telecommunications industry that would be billing systems and network provisioning systems and network inventory systems; core applications to run their business, to run telco. Core applications to run a bank. Core applications to run a retail chain of stores. Core applications to run a utility. That’s our focus, and that allows us to leverage the existing relationships that we have because we already sell databases to these companies, we sell middleware to these companies. We sell ERP and CRM to these companies, and now we want to sell this industry-specific software.
Now, when a CEO says that something is a company’s “most important announcement ever,” it’s time to check your hyperbole meter. (E.g., I recall Larry saying that about, of all things, a release of Oracle’s application development tools.) Still, there are at least three strong reasons to take last week’s statements more or less seriously: Read more
| Categories: Oracle, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
Oracle promises to respond to the data warehouse appliance makers
On Oracle’s quarterly conference call September 20, Larry Ellison said:
There are some interesting niche players. Sybase gets smaller every year. Teradata, a database machine and now there’s some new database machine players, Neteeza, and let me say that Oracle is a very innovative company and I think you’ll see us with a response to some of these niche players some time at the end of this year or next year.
How important this is depends hugely, of course, on just what form Oracle’s response takes.
Oracle already does a great job of accelerating complex queries within the severe limitations of its SMP/shared-everything architecture. If it just does more of the same, perhaps adding in some hardware optimizations and vendor relationships, it will be a big ho-hum. At best, such moves will improve Oracle’s price/performance somewhat and garner some favorable publicity, and postpone the serious bleeding for a while as Oracle tries to find a better way of dealing with the specialist threat.
Much more significant would be a new engine, whether developed inhouse or acquired. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
Market reach tidbits from Netezza’s conference call
I’ve been slow to notice a very useful service being provided by Seeking Alpha, namely transcripts of quarterly earnings conference calls. For example, the Netezza call on August 23 revealed that Netezza sells approximately as many systems per year as it has quota-carrying sales teams. Or maybe it’s closer to 2 sales per team, especially for the more experienced ones. More precisely, the numbers discussed were 6-15 sales per quarter, and 35 sales teams. Average deal size was $2.3 million; based on the earnings press release, that suggests 10-11 deals depending on how much service revenue (if any) was included.
And by the way, if Netezza does 6-15 sales per quarter, and has a much smaller average sale than DATAllegro, and has much more revenue than DATAllegro — well, it’s easy to understand why DATAllegro isn’t exhibiting a very long list of customers.
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| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 1 Comment |
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10
Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.
There also are some big performance boosts. Read more
Some pushback from DATAllegro against the columnar argument
I was chatting with Stuart Frost this evening (DATAllegro’s CEO). As usual, I grilled him about customer counts; as usual, he was evasive, but expressed general ebullience about the pace of business; also as usual, he was charming and helpful on other subjects.
In particular, we talked about the Vertica story, and he offered some interesting pushback. Part was blindingly obvious — Vertica’s not in the marketplace yet, when they are the product won’t be mature, and so on. Part was the also obvious “we can do most of that ourselves” line of argument, some of which I’ve summarized in a comment here. But he made two other interesting points as well. Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
The core of the Vertica story still seems to be compression
Back in March, I suggested that compression was a central and compelling aspect of Vertica’s story. Well, in their new blog, the Vertica guys now strongly reinforce that impression.
I recommend those two Database Column posts (by Sam Madden) highly. I’ve rarely seen such a clear, detailed presentation of a company’s technical argument. My own thoughts on the subject boil down to:
- In principle, all the technology (and hence all the technological advantages) they’re talking about could be turned into features of one of the indexing options of a row-oriented RDBMS. But in practice, there’s no indication that this will happen any time soon.
- Release 1 of the Vertica product will surely have many rough edges.
- Some startups are surprisingly ignorant of the issue involved in building a successful, industrial-strength DBMS. But a company that has both Mike Stonebraker and Jerry Held seriously involved has a big advantage. They may make other kinds of errors, but they won’t make many ignorant ones.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Michael Stonebraker, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 5 Comments |
Three bold assertions by Mike Stonebraker
In the first “meat” — i.e., other than housekeeping — post on the new Database Column blog, Mike Stonebraker makes three core claims:
1. Different DBMS should be used for different purposes. I am in violent agreement with that point, which is indeed a major theme of this blog.
2. Vertica’s software is 50X faster than anything non-columnar and 10X faster than anything columnar. Now, some of these stats surely come from the syndrome of comparing the future release of your product, as tuned by world’s greatest experts on it who also hope to get rich on their stock options in your company, vs. some well-established production release of your competitors’ products, tuned to an unknown level of excellence,* with the whole thing running test queries that you, in your impartial wisdom, deem representative of user needs. Or something like that … Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database diversity, Michael Stonebraker, OLTP, Theory and architecture, TransRelational | 3 Comments |
The Vertica guys have their own blog now
I’ve written a considerable amount about Vertica and/or the opinions of Mike Stonebraker. Now the Vertica guys have their own blog, which they pledge will not just be a rehash of Vertica marketing pitches — notwithstanding the Vertica-related wordplay in the blog’s name.*
*Those guys are good at wordplay.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Humor, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |