Netezza’s chip story
In addition to its software story, Netezza of course has a rather unique chip story. Where other vendors might have standard disk controllers and high-powered microprocessors, Netezza respectively has a FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) and lesser microprocessor (PowerPC). Netezza claims that two major advantages of these choices are:
- 5X throughput/performance improvement
- Much lower heat and power consumption.
The main function of the FPGA, other than generically getting data on and off disk, is to restrict and project tables (i.e., execute single-table WHERE clauses). Netezza claims that their FPGAs can perform these operations on the streaming data at least as quickly as an expensive, hot, power-hungry top-end microprocessor would, and indeed faster. The key word is “streaming”, which they contrast to the microprocessor’s need to get the data in and then back out of RAM (cache or otherwise).
I’ll be interested to see whether somebody can muster a ringing refutation to Netezza’s claims.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Netezza | 12 Comments |
Netezza vs. conventional data warehousing RDBMS
For various reasons, I’m not going to try to give a comprehensive overview of the Netezza story. But I’d like to highlight four points that illustrate a lot of the difference between Netezza’s architecture and that of more conventional data warehousing DBMS.
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| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 6 Comments |
Dealing with Netezza has not been easy
Over the past year, Netezza has exhibited the squirreliest question-dodging behavior I’ve seen from a DBMS vendor since – actually, since Sybase tried to conceal the System 10 fiasco in 1993-5. To its credit, however, Netezza finally decided to open the kimono. Specifically, they invited me to their user conference, which I attended today, and indeed were quite helpful in FINALLY getting my questions addressed, and in offering more access as needed.
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| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Netezza | 2 Comments |
Is data warehousing now all about sequential access?
A lot of evidence is pointing to a major paradigm shift in data warehouse RDBMS, along the lines of:
Old way: Assume I/O is random; lower total execution time by improving selectivity and thus lowering the amount of I/O.
New way: Drive the amount of random I/O to near zero, and do as much sequential I/O as necessary to achieve this goal.
Examples include:
- Data warehouse appliances (see especially this discussion of DATallegro’s architecture)
- Columnar systems (see Nathan Myer’s first comment in this discussion of the much-hyped Required Technologies prototype)
- Memory-centric systems, notably SAP’s BI Accelerator
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, Memory-centric data management, SAP AG, Theory and architecture, TransRelational | 4 Comments |
Overflowing spam catcher
I use Akismet as a spam-catcher. On the whole it’s good, but it has one annoying deficiency — you can only review the 150 most recent suspected spam. This time around, however, I had 766 suspected spam. If you had a valid comment in the 616 I couldn’t review, I’m sorry. Please be so kind as to resubmit it.
Thanks,
CAM
EDIT: The attack continues. Today I deleted 245 real or imagined spam. A couple of days ago it was 135, all real.
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
Mark Logic and the MarkLogic Server
I’ve been interested in the Mark Logic story from the first time CEO Dave Kellogg told me about it. Basically, Mark Logic sells an XML-based DBMS optimized for text search, called MarkLogic Server. For obvious reasons, they don’t want to position it as a DBMS; hence they call it an “XML content server” instead. I posted about their marketing and application focus over on Text Technologies. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper into the core technology.
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| Categories: MarkLogic, Structured documents | 3 Comments |
Business Objects on EIM, ETL, etc.
I chatted with some Business Objects ETL/EIM (Enterprise Information Management) folks today, in a call that was a direct response to what I heard from and posted about Informatica. The core of the Business Objects story can be summarized (albeit brutally!) like this:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
Introduction to Greenplum and some compare/contrast
Netezza relies on FPGAs. DATallegro essentially uses standard components, but those include Infiniband cards (and there’s a little FPGA action when they do encryption). Greenplum, however, claims to offer a highly competitive data warehouse solution that’s so software-only you can download it from their web site. That said, their main sales mode seems to also be through appliances, specifically ones branded and sold by Sun, combining Greenplum and open source software on a “Thumper” box. And the whole thing supposedly scales even higher than DATallegro and Netezza, because you can manage over a petabyte if you chain together a dozen of the 100 terabyte racks.
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| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Data warehouse appliances, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Netezza, Open source, PostgreSQL | 4 Comments |
QlikView – a leader in memory-centric BI
QlikTech — the vendor of QlikView — contacted me to tell their memory-centric BI story. A Swedish company with >$23 million in estimated license revenue last year and a 100%ish growth rate, they claim to be the leader in that space, pulling ahead of Applix. But for now, I’ll call them “a” leader, and say that their story sounds like a hybrid between those of Applix (TM1 product) and SAP (BI Accelerator).
| Categories: Business intelligence, Cognos, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView, SAP AG | 1 Comment |
eBay’s version of DBMS2
Every sufficiently large or agile enterprise needs to follow the DBMS2 approach. The following is from an article on eBay’s version:
“eBay has built a software-based Integration Tier. This contains both a data access layer (DAL) and a services framework. The Integration Tier acts as an abstraction layer for software engineers to work with many disparate back-end data sources through a consistent set of abstractions.”
| Categories: EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, eBay, Specific users | Leave a Comment |