ParAccel update
In connection with Amazon’s Redshift announcement, ParAccel reached out, and so I talked with them for the first time in a long while. At the highest level:
- ParAccel now has 60+ customers, up from 30+ two years ago and 40ish soon thereafter.
- ParAccel is now focusing its development and marketing on analytic platform capabilities more than raw database performance.
- ParAccel is focusing on working alongside other analytic data stores — relational or Hadoop — rather than supplanting them.
There wasn’t time for a lot of technical detail, but I gather that the bit about working alongside other data stores:
- Is relatively new.
- Works via SELECT statements that reach out to the other data stores.
- Is called “on-demand integration”.
- Is built in ParAccel’s extensibility/analytic platform framework.
- Uses HCatalog when reaching into Hadoop.
Also, it seems that ParAccel:
- Is in the early stages of writing its own analytic functions.
- Bundles Fuzzy Logix and actually has some users for that.
Various of my questions were answered more in email than on the phone, which I got permission to quote and lightly edit. (Text-bolding is by me.)
ParAccel’s customer stats turn out to be:
We currently have won more than 60 paying customers, since opening our doors in 2005. In the last year, we have added 16 additional customers. It’s also important to note that our existing customers continue to expand their use of ParAccel. We have closed 11 new deals with existing customers in the last year. These are all paying customers with ParAccel in production or in development and moving to production.
On the phone, ParAccel cited Evernote and Home Depot as recent new customer wins.
In response to a question about concurrent usage, ParAccel wrote:
We support up to 5,000 connections on a single ParAccel instance. Our emphasis is on analytic performance, and in Proof of Value projects, we encourage testing of our advanced analytic capabilities in real-world scenarios – the more complex the analytics, the better ParAccel performs against the competition. For example, one of our retail customers has an algorithm running within ParAccel with 10,000 lines of code. Another financial services customer runs a 25,000 line SQL query for dynamic risk stress testing.
Here are some of the projects with the largest number of users accessing a ParAccel-based system:
- MicroStrategy Wisdom has more than 38,000 users of the system.
- We have some large retailers with 1000 to 2000 stores regularly accessing store-specific analytics.
Regarding large databases, ParAccel wrote:
Here are some large current implementations, all expected to grow significantly in the next year:
- Merkle: 50 TB
- Large internet company: 40 TB
- Large financial institution: 20 TB
We also know that Amazon is running a very large, PB+ implementation on their platform based on components licensed from ParAccel.
I don’t know what happened to the two 100+ terabyte customers ParAccel cited in 2010.
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