Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant
Edit: Comments on the February, 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — and on the companies reviewed in it — are now up.
The Gartner 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant is out. I shall now comment, just as I did to varying degrees on the 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants.
Note: Links to Gartner Magic Quadrants tend to be unstable. Please alert me if any problems arise; I’ll edit accordingly.
In my comments on the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant, I observed that Gartner’s “completeness of vision” scores were generally pretty reasonable, but their “ability to execute” rankings were somewhat bizarre; the same remains true this year. For example, Gartner ranks Ingres higher by that metric than Vertica, Aster Data, ParAccel, or Infobright. Yet each of those companies is growing nicely and delivering products that meet serious cutting-edge analytic DBMS needs, neither of which has been true of Ingres since about 1987.
The general list of “market forces, end-user expectations and vendors’ resulting solution approaches” at the top of the 2010 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant article is a mixed bag. Following Gartner’s order, I’ll address those first, and particular companies cited afterwards. Specific items and comments include:
- “Increased demand for optimization techniques and performance enhancement.“ Gartner seems to be saying that data warehouse DBMS buyers want lists of specific, esoteric performance features. Well, buyers always want their DBMS to run fast, and they’d like the products to be mature enough to have been through a few rounds of Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole, but otherwise I’m not sure I’d put that at the top of my list.
- “The argument made by purchasing departments that buying power increases when dealing with a single, incumbent vendor.“ I agree that vendor consolidation and account control are a huge part of the Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and even Teradata stories. (Vertica can prove it’s 10X more price-performant than Oracle and still not get the business.) But it’s not just about price negotiations; once annual maintenance is included, one has to squint pretty hard to see Oracle as a low-cost alternative. Also important is reducing the number of total product-specific skill-sets needed on the IT staff.
- “Prepackaged, prebalanced warehouse environments delivered using data warehouse appliances.“ Yep. To varying extents, Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata, and IBM are all committed to designed-hardware strategies.
- “Expectations for the delivery of on-site POCs.“ Honestly, not as many buyers insist on on-site Proofs of Concept as should. Still, Oracle is shameful in its reluctance to do them. (Teradata tries to avoid them too, for obvious reasons of expense, but is much more gracious about capitulating when the buyer insists.)
- “Cost controls and data warehouse performance management.“ See next comment.
- “Demands for delivering a fully mixed workload.“ I’d have phrased the workload management and administrative tools points rather differently than this, but so be it.
- “Demands for departmental analytics delivered quickly via data marts.“ Agreed. Data-mart-only installations are a huge part of the market of the analytic DBMS market. Data mart spin-out is also important.
- “Wider indexing and fast performance within clusters of data, delivered via column-based solutions.“ This bizarrely seems to conflate column stores and parallel processing (both of which are of course highly important).
- “A wave of new data warehouse implementers seeking fast-track, low-risk delivery.“ Well, yes. Netezza noticed that quite some years ago. And by now the long-gestation EDW (Enterprise Data Warehouse) is widely disliked.
- “Global organizations seeking distributed solutions as potential architecture.“ If this is the MPP point, it’s oddly phrased. If this is a suggestion that data warehouses should be partitioned across wide-area networks, it’s just plain odd. If it’s a reiteration that departments like to control their own data marts, I agree. And if it’s a comment on keep-data-in-the-country privacy laws, it could be the most prescient thing Donald Feinberg has said in many years.
Long though it is, that list of general items and issues for the 2010 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant has some gaps. Most glaringly, I don’t see any references to advanced analytics in general, or even to the specific case of integrated predictive analytics. There’s also nothing about solid-state memory or other storage-technology considerations, although in fairness it’s still early days for much of what vendors conceive of as competitive differentiation in those respects.
Here are some vendor-specific comments on the 2010 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant:
- It’s pretty bizarre to compare 1010data to database.com or Microsoft Azure. Kognitio would be a better choice. So would cloud-hosted instances of Vertica, Aster Data nCluster, or others.
- Gartner’s comments on Aster Data and nCluster are actually pretty reasonable.
- Gartner’s comments on EMC/Greenplum are a bit Kool-Aid-drinky, and don’t account for the inevitable flailing that occurs right after an acquisition. But otherwise they’re pretty reasonable.
- I don’t take IBM’s super-comprehensive-all-inclusive architectural stories as seriously as Gartner does.
- I don’t take Netezza’s small stable of OEM partners as seriously as Gartner does. I also don’t share Gartner’s optimism for the continuation of Netezza’s NEC partnership in the face of IBM’s Netezza ownership.
- I’m even more skeptical about illuminate than Gartner is.
- I’m delighted that Gartner has adopted my phrase machine-generated data (Infobright is one of several firms pushing that one).
- “Only open-source column-store DBMS” is a bit exaggerated, but Infobright is indeed the only one with serious traction, or offered by a serious analytic DBMS vendor.
- What Gartner said in connection with Ingres is too inaccurate to deserve detailed attention.
- While Gartner’s write-up of Kognitio is a bit confused, that’s excusable. Kognitio’s strategy changes often.
- I’m not persuaded by the claim of low Microsoft TCO. The days when Microsoft’s tools were vastly better than the competition’s are long gone. And using an OLTP DBMS for data warehousing generally takes more people effort than using something more purpose-built.
- Gartner is right to ding Oracle for high prices, high people costs, and unwillingness to do onsite POCs.
- Gartner is right that Exadata is a huge improvement over non-Exadata Oracle data warehousing.
- Gartner is right to suggest that Exadata can easily handle data warehouses over 20 terabytes in size, but wrong to suggest that software-only Oracle also can. Just because the pain is less than it was with earlier releases of Oracle doesn’t mean it isn’t still bad.
- Gartner’s comments on ParAccel are pretty reasonable.
- Gartner’s comments on compression in connection with SAND make no technical sense (tokenization is a key form of columnar compression, not an alternative to it). Also, SAP’s acquisition of Sybase is a business challenge for SAND, not a technical one.
- Unless I’m forgetting something, Sybase IQ has no more in-database data mining than any other Fuzzy Logix partner does.
- Gartner failed to note that, like other DBMS dating back to the 1990s and before, Sybase IQ is more complex to administer than some newer products are.
- Gartner’s take on Teradata is pretty reasonable.
- Gartner’s take on Vertica, while sloppy, is basically sensible. However, Gartner failed to note that Vertica is a laggard in non-query analytics. (I am sure those deficiencies are being addressed, but Vertica’s competitors are moving ahead as well.)
Comments
23 Responses to “Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant”
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Gartner describing infobright as the “only open-source column-store DBMS on the market” is not just an exaggeration it is flat out wrong. Calpont/infinidb and DynamoBI/LucidDB are two others just off the top of my head. It makes me wonder how thorough Gartner’s research really is.
Actually, I’d have started with VectorWise, which they actually wrote about.
Curt, very good coverage.
Should be included by Gartner on same page or pdf where their MQ is. Hope Gartner folks will consider it seriously if they do care about being professional analysts 🙂
Hello Curt,
I really don’t follow the logic of your unflagging support for on-site POC’s. Consider that,
1) A preference one way or the other most certainly favors certain vendors. Something that, from a customer perspective, is problematic from the start.
2) If you don’t trust the vendor to run an honest POC, you shouldn’t be evaluting them to begin wtih.
3) If you don’t have the technical know-how to ensure an honest evaluation, you should be hiring someone who does to the run the POC.
4) It’s time spent that could be better used running a good POC – If its not time spent then see point #1 about favoring certain vendors.
I’ve seen very good and very bad POC’s run both onsite and off. I challenge you to take a position on this topic as a customer, rather then vendor, advocate.
Regards
Eric,
Your comment is almost entirely nonsensical, with the last sentence being highly insulting to me.
If one only buys from vendors that one is certain would never engage in any kind of misleading sales practice, it’s pretty hard to run an IT shop beyond the “abacus” generation of technology.
@Erik I back Curt up on this, as a customer. It is always preferable to run a PoC onsite if possible
1: Your data is safer
2: At an offsite PoC you have no idea how much effort went into tuning and optimizing the environment. This is important information as YOU are the one who is going to stuck doing all that at some point
3: You get to see how the hardware performs in your data center, on your network, which is after all, where it is going to end up eventually
4: Your team builds a lot of hands on, working knowledge about the product during the PoC which can help you make the final decision
5: Vendors do, in fact, upon occasion, lie their asses off in PoC’s
[…] getting the increasing impression that certain industry observers, such as Gartner, are really confused about columnar technology. (I further suspect that certain vendors are […]
I should add that it’s not ALWAYS the case that one should do an on-site POC. If there were general industry knowledge that the results of Oracle-controlled POCs were reliable guides to production, or at least to the results of customer-site POCs, then prospective buyers might well individually choose to not bother insisting on an on-site test.
But as matters stand, Oracle is way too controlling of the Exadata-related information flow.
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What exactly do you mean by “non-query analytics”? Google returns total of 4 results for this expression – all to this page or aggregators.
Examples of non-query analytics: Data mining/predictive analytics, monte carlo analysis, etc. I.e., tasks where the main processing load isn’t just query execution.
So my post is “nonsensical” – rebuttal in one word is clever indeed – yet you jump to the complete other end of the spectrum with this:
“If one only buys from vendors that one is certain would never engage in any kind of misleading sales practice, it’s pretty hard to run an IT shop beyond the “abacus” generation of technology”
So 1) All vendors are devious and 2) All customers are clever in their own house yet somehow take leave of their senses when they step on another vendors premises? – Ok that was a bit tongue-in-check – enough arguing the extremes.
I’ve been a part of, or run, well over 100 POC’s of meaningful size over the past 10 years. On average the ones run in customer sites are the least well managed and the most prone to manipulation. Customers who run POC’s onsite never show up – they are dragged away by constant interruptions, delegate important tasks away and frequently have to deal with multiple vendors “cooks in the kitchen” onsite at the same time to make the logistics work. On a whole, its a mess. If you want opportunities to manipulate a POC – host it at the customore site.
The very best POC’s I have seen have brought the customer teams to an offsite location and been heads-down on the technology for 3-5 days non-stop. If you are truly worried about vendors doing sneaky things (which is healthy but overplayed these days) bringing them onsite is a false promise of security. I’ve caught other vendors posting results that defy physics or prove optimizations were used that were off-limits both onsite and off – The customer is nearly always oblivious.
The real defense is to have a well constructed POC with smart individuals participating. Onsite or offsite is a very small factor. The only time it should matter is if security reasons demand it.
I still think your perspective here is biased. It favors the ability to efficiently deploy onsite POC’s and I can think of no good reason how that correlates to a “good DW technology”. One vendor in particular has made their entire POC strategy “Fear-mongering over onsite POC’s” because they have a deployment advantage that really on matters in POC’s (nobody deploys the hardware every day).
It seems you have taken this to mean that I infer you were paid to take this position. I am not. These thoughts are exclusive, yet I could have made my position more clear. You have my apologies for that.
I do think you over-emphasize onn of the least valuable elements of a POC – where it is at. And I think the points I have made supporting that are far from “non-sensical”.
Regards
Eric,
I don’t respond well to comments that more or less accuse me of corruption. And while we’re speculating about people’s biases, honest or otherwise, it would have been nice if you’d more clearly identified yourself as being from Microsoft (you happened to have left a typo in your email address the first time around, so at that point I wasn’t sure that you were).
Anyhow …
I’m not a believer that all POCs should be done onsite, the way Netezza wishes that I and everybody else would be. But I believe that a vendor should at least have the capability of doing onsite POCs. Microsoft, I gather from your comment, does them. Vertica and ParAccel do; indeed, one can just download Vertica and do one’s own, and the same is true for Greenplum, Infobright, and others. Teradata does, despite having all the same apparent reasons Oracle does for disliking them. Netezza of course does. Oracle stands pretty much alone in doing onsite POCs so very, very, very rarely that nobody can identify an example of one.
In fairness I should have disclosed that I still have a prsentation of yours in mind from…gosh probably 2 years back now..where you really hit the onsite POC topic hard (my perception). I think that one was TDWI related….
And I am a bit off-topic in this thread – Your coverage of the Gartner “analysis” is about vendor feature/capabilities and the topical issue is who supports what types of POCs – as you pointed out.
I should have dug up that old post!
Eric,
I bet you’re referring to http://www.dbms2.com/2009/02/25/even-more-final-version-of-my-tdwi-slide-deck/
Curt thank you for highlighting some of the things in the Gartner report. Over recent years a number of analysts decided SAND was going to be bought by SAP and stated this as a high likelihood. This has never been a SAND’s plan and so SAP buying Sybase didn’t faze us at all. It does seem to have caused analysts to question our strategy. This is a challenge as we are put in the position of trying to prove a negative.
There are a number of other things worth addressing in the report. Highlighting SAND as a niche vendor when compared to Oracle, Teradata and IBM is fair. These vendors all have billions of dollars to be jack of all trades in a broad market. SAND’s focus is to be the best analytic database possible, and to focus on powering applications that require what you describe as investigative analytics, what are also identified as Ad Hoc, or Data Mining applications. This our focus. We do have customers with hundreds of terabytes and tens of thousands of users on the same application, but that is not our primary focus. Our focus is powering applications that require iterative analysis and to do that better than anyone else; churn analytics, billing analysis, marketing segmentation, retail market basket analysis. SAND is the database power behind the programme that many commentators say took one customer from the UK’s number 2 grocer to the number 1 in Europe.
There were also a number of things we will ask the Gartner team to address in next year’s MQ because we must have failed to communicate some data points correctly, as follows:-
“SAND has been in existence for approximately eight years” – we have been in business for 25 years.
“Its technology is used as an analytic engine and as an archive engine” – we have customers who use us to mix workload exactly as Gartner describes. We have a column oriented database for ultra fast analytics and we have a column oriented extension for keeping vast amounts of low-value data online. We have customers who use us as an EDW, and as a performance layer for Oracle, SAS and others.
“It will continue to struggle against the larger vendors and venture-funded start-ups that can invest more in R&D, marketing and sales” – we have 800 man years of development, I think the start-ups will have to run fast to catch up.
“SAP’s acquisition of Sybase poses a technological challenge for SAND” – agreed with your comments, this is not a technological challenge for us, nor a business one. SAP’s acquiring Sybase at some level validates columnar technology, SAND’s in-memory strategy which HANA is very similar to, and it poses no more of a challenge for us then the “venture-funded start-ups”.
There are some things we are delighted they highlighted
“Because of the tokenization and column store, it requires no indexing or query tuning” – this is detailed as a key criteria for the future of warehousing, with Gartner acknowledging that others don’t have it. SAND has been perfecting this for over a decade (please see above the 8 year comment). So ironically this was seen as visionary then but we didn’t tell them, so that was our fault.
“It is also a good choice for analytic data marts to support the off-loading of workloads from an enterprise data warehouse. In addition, several customers use SAND’s technology as an enterprise data warehouse” – Agreed, please note these customers that use SAND as an EDW are running hundreds of Terabytes of data and unusually in the EDW market deployed to tens of thousands of users, with use of SAND in real-time call centres with real-time responses for thousands of concurrent users.
Curt,
I’m engaged in an on-site Oracle Exadata POC for data warehousing. This is obviously the exception, but apparently it does happen.
Mike Pilcher; To call Teradata a jack of all trades is unfair since they are the only mega vendor here solely focusing on analytical data warehouse solutions and do not have any OLTP solutions like Oracle, IBM. This is their strength since they don’t try to get a database to do things it hasn’t been designed for at all like the other vendors here.
But you are right that they have the funding and organisation in order to deliver globally and are not likely to be aquired by any of the other vendors.
I’m also engaging in an on-site Oracle Exadata POC for data warehousing and apparently it does happen.
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