September 29, 2009
What Nielsen really uses in data warehousing DBMS
In its latest earnings call, Oracle made a reference to The Nielsen Company that was — to put it politely — rather confusing. I just plopped down in a chair next to Greg Goff, who evidently runs data warehousing at Nielsen, and had a quick chat. Here’s the real story.
- The Nielsen Company has over half a petabyte of data on Netezza in the US. This installation is growing.
- The Nielsen Company indeed has 45 terabytes or whatever of data on Oracle in its European (Customer) Information Factory. This is not particularly growing. Nielsen’s Oracle data warehouse has been built up over the past 9 years. It’s not new. It’s certainly not on Exadata, nor planned to move to Exadata.
- These are not single-instance databases. Nielsen’s biggest single Netezza database is 20 terabytes or so of user data, and its biggest single Oracle database is 10 terabytes or so.
- Much (most?) of the rest of the installations are customer data marts and the like, based in each case on the “big” central database. (That’s actually a classic data mart use case.) Greg said that Netezza’s capabilities to spin out those databases seemed pretty good.
- That 10 terabyte Oracle data warehouse instance requires a lot of partitioning effort and so on in the usual way.
- Nielsen has no immediate plans to replace Oracle with Netezza.
- Nielsen actually has 800 terabytes or so of Netezza equipment. Some of that is kept more lightly loaded, for performance.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Oracle, Specific users
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6 Responses to “What Nielsen really uses in data warehousing DBMS”
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[…] I’m keynoting the Netezza road show this month, and AC Nielsen is up there on stage touting Netezza. (Edit: Nielsen indeed does the overwhelming majority of its data warehousing on Netezza.) […]
According to the Netezza FY2009 annual report, “The Nielsen Company accounted for 16% of our total revenue in fiscal 2009”. That’s roughly $30M in Fiscal 2009 (ended January 31, 2009) alone.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this comment are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Teradata. The views and opinions expressed by others on this comment thread are theirs, not mine.
@John Susag
..by others…are theirs…
Oh dude, that is really the mother of all disclaimers! lol
Nielsen is a conglomerate with many businesses. I believe Nielsen Media Research has had a large (columnar) Sybase IQ installation for several years for TV advertising demographics.
Indeed. Sybase IQ and Sybase ASE have far more data stored for analytics than Netezza at Nielsen. I’ll bet this guy Greg does not want to lose his job if Mitchell Habib found out that he was not touting Netezza.
I like pizza