April 16, 2010
Story of an analytic DBMS evaluation
One of our readers was kind enough to walk me through his analytic DBMS evaluation process. The story is:
- The X Company (XCo) has a <1 TB database.
- 100s of XCo’s customers log in at once to run reports. 50-200 concurrent queries is a good target number.
- XCo had been “suffering” with Oracle and wanted to upgrade.
- XCo didn’t have a lot of money to spend. Netezza pulled out of the sales cycle early due to budget (and this was recently enough that Netezza Skimmer could have been bid).
- Greenplum didn’t offer any references that approached the desired number of concurrent users.
- Ultimately the evaluation came down to Vertica and ParAccel.
- Vertica won.
Notes on the Vertica vs. ParAccel selection include:
- ParAccel sent an engineer on-site to do a proof-of-concept (POC), and generally competed very hard for the deal.
- Vertica dropped by for a sales call once, and let XCo do the Vertica POC itself.
- Not surprisingly, XCo got the impression that Vertica was easier to set up and administer than ParAccel.
- Also, when ParAccel emphasized architectural features such as custom “backplane” and compiled queries, XCo got the impression – right or wrong – that ParAccel’s performance was more brittle or situational than Vertica’s.
- ParAccel was modestly faster than Vertica in the POC. (I think — Vertica’s numbers were described as being “very competitive.”)
- In multiple ways, Vertica gave the impression of greater product and vendor maturity than ParAccel.
My contact continues to be interested in all things Greenplum, and has recommended Greenplum Single-Node Edition to his analyst colleagues.
Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Vertica Systems
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Comments
7 Responses to “Story of an analytic DBMS evaluation”
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Interesting, < 1Tb and so much competition
Where XCo is located? US/Canada or somewhere else
Vertica was cheaper compared to Netezza?
North America.
Recall that Vertica prices per TB of user data.
Hi Curt, I believe know the customer well. I was in the east coast for another meeting and participated in meeting XCo face to face. They are in an interesting business, but the actual database requirement was discouragingly simple. More important than the size of the data, their performance requirement was way outside of our sweet spot because they only a very small cluster to get the performance they needed. We are much more targeted to more complex customer use cases, where extreme performance of difficult queries on nasty schemas is the customer’s decision point. Otherwise, there are too many players that can address the customer need, and it becomes a discounting game.
Barry –
If the usecase was so “discouragingly simple” why was there a need to send an engineer onsite to do a proof of concept?
Hi Barry,
Makes sense. This certainly sounded to me like a case of numerous pretty simple queries being executed concurrently. And I’m sure the contract size wasn’t very high, as per my comment above that Netezza Skimmer was out of the acceptable price range.
But Dave K’s question is also a good one. 😉
Best,
CAM
And Barry’s hyperlinked name points to http://www.paracell.com. Unintentional, I guess.
Ajeet
[…] come much cheaper. Since ParAccel has little chance of surviving as an independent company — too immature and too little differentiation to overcome that — I’d expect ParAccel’s board to […]