May 23, 2008
Data warehouse appliance power user TEOCO
If you had to name super-high-end users of data warehouse technology, your list might start with a few retailers, credit data processors, and telcos, plus the US intelligence establishment. Well, it turns out that TEOCO runs outsourced data warehouses for several of the top US telcos, making it one of the top data warehouse technology users around.
A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating chat with John Devolites of TEOCO. Highlights included:
- TEOCO runs a >200 TB DATAllegro warehouse for a major US telco. (When we hear about a big DATAllegro telco site that’s been in production for a while, that’s surely the one they’re talking about.)
- TEOCO runs around 450 TB total of DATAllegro databases across its various customers. (When Stuart Frost blogs of >400 TB “systems,” that may be what he’s talking about.)
- TEOCO likes DATAllegro better than Netezza, although the margin is now small. This is mainly for financial reasons, specifically price-per-terabyte. When TEOCO spends its own money without customer direction as to appliance brand, it buys DATAllegro.
- TEOCO runs at least one 50 TB Netezza system — originally due to an acquisition of a Netezza user — with more coming. There also is more DATAllegro coming.
- TEOCO feels 15-30 concurrent users is the current practical limit for both DATAllegro and Netezza. That’s greater than it used to be.
- Netezza is a little faster than DATAllegro on a few esoteric queries, but the difference is not important to TEOCO’s business.
- Official price lists notwithstanding, TEOCO sees prices as being in the $10K/TB range. DATAllegro’s price advantage has shrunk greatly, as others have come down to more or less match. However, since John stated his price preference for DATAllegro as being in the present tense, I presume the price match isn’t perfect.
- Teradata was never a serious consideration, for price reasons.
- In the original POC a few years ago, the incumbent Oracle — even after extensive engineering — couldn’t get an important query down under 8 hours of running time. DATAllegro and Netezza both handled it in 2-3 minutes. Similarly, Oracle couldn’t get the load time for 100 million call detail records (CDRs) below 24 hours.
- Applications sound pretty standard for telecom: Lots of CDR processing — 550 million/day on the big DATAllegro system cited above. Pricing and fraud checking. Some data staging for legal reasons (giving the NSA what it subpoenas and no more).
Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza, Pricing, Specific users, Telecommunications, TEOCO
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7 Responses to “Data warehouse appliance power user TEOCO”
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“Oracle couldn’t get the load time for 100 million call detail records (CDRs) below 24 hours.”
This is a misleading statement. Oracle is perfectly capable of meeting and beating the best benchmarks – it just depends on who is doing the engineering.
AT&T Mobility (in Atlanta, GA) loads an average of 2.5 Billion (not million) CDRs per day, all within a 320TB database. The database vendor? Oracle, fine-tuned by LGR Telecommunications.
This is not a test system, but a live production environment (dating back to Cingular days) that has recently been pushed to in excess of 10 Billion records per day.
TEOCO’s CEO told me that his people tried AND that Oracle itself repeatedly tried.
Meanwhile, I’m interested in that Oracle site you’re referring to. Is it the OLTP database of record, a data warehouse, or a complete integration of the two disciplines? It’s one thing to bang lots of records into an OLTP database, an area where Oracle excels. It’s quite another to do analytic queries with reasonable performance, especially if you use the kinds of indexing schemes common in large Oracle data warehouses.
CAM
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