The Netezza guys propose a POC checklist
The Netezza guys at “Data Liberators” are being a bit too cute in talking about FULL DISCLOSURE yet not actually saying they’re from Netezza — but only a bit, in that their identity is pretty clear even so. That said, they’ve proposed a not-terrible checklist of how to conduct POCs. Of course, vendor-provided as it is, it’s incomplete; e.g., there’s no real mention of a baseball-bat test.
Here’s the first part of the Netezza list, with my comments interspersed. Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing, Netezza | 1 Comment |
Final (for now) slides on how to select a data warehouse DBMS
I’ve now posted a final version of the slide deck* I first posted Wednesday. And I do mean final; TDWI likes its slide decks locked down weeks in advance, because they go to the printer to be memorialized on dead trees. I added or fleshed out notes on quite a few slides vs. the prior draft. Actual changes to the slides themselves, however, were pretty sparse, and mainly were based on comments to the prior post. Thanks for all the help!
*That’s a new URL. The old deck is still up too, for those morbidly curious as to what I did or didn’t change.
| Categories: Buying processes, Data warehousing, Presentations | 14 Comments |
Draft slides on how to select an analytic DBMS
I need to finalize an already-too-long slide deck on how to select an analytic DBMS by late Thursday night. Anybody see something I’m overlooking, or just plain got wrong?
Edit: The slides have now been finalized.
Oracle says they do onsite Exadata POCs after all
When I first asked Oracle about Netezza’s claim that Oracle doesn’t do onsite Exadata POCs, they blew off the question. Then I showed Oracle an article draft saying they don’t do onsite Exadata proofs-of-concept. At that point, Oracle denied Netezza’s claim, and told me there indeed have been onsite Exadata POCs. Oracle has not yet been able to provide me with any actual examples of same, but perhaps that will change soon. In the mean time, I continue with the assumption that Oracle is, at best, reluctant to do Exadata POCs at customer sites.
I do understand multiple reasons for vendors to prefer POCs be done on their own sites, both innocent (cost) and nefarious (excessive degrees of control). Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle | 10 Comments |
Netezza’s marketing goes retro again
Netezza loves retro images in its marketing, such as classic rock lyrics, or psychedelic paint jobs on its SPUs. (Given the age demographics at, say, a Teradata or Netezza user conference, this isn’t as nutty as it first sounds.) Netezza’s latest is a creative peoples-liberation/revolution riff, under the name Data Liberators. The ambience of that site and especially its first download should seem instinctively familiar to anybody who recalls the Symbionese Liberation Army when it was active, or who has ever participated in a chant of “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”
The substance of the first “pamphlet”, so far as I can make out, is that you should only trust vendors who do short, onsite POCs, and Oracle may not do those for Exadata. Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, Netezza, Oracle | 2 Comments |
Expressor pre-announces a data loading benchmark leapfrog
Expressor Software plans to blow the Vertica/Syncsort “benchmark” out of the water, to wit
What I know already is that our numbers will between 7 and 8 min to load one TB of data and will set another world record for the tpc-h benchmark.
The whole blog post has a delightful air of skepticism, e.g.:
Sometimes the mention of a join and lookup are documented but why? If the files are load ready what is there to join or lookup?
… If the files are load ready and the bulk load interface is used, what exactly is done with the DI product?
My guess… nothing.
… But what I can’t figure out is what is so complex about this test in the first place?
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Expressor | Leave a Comment |
How to buy an analytic DBMS (overview)
I went to London for a couple of days last week, at the behest of Kognitio. Since I was in the neighborhood anyway, I visited their offices for a briefing. But the main driver for the trip was a seminar Thursday at which I was the featured speaker. As promised, the slides have been uploaded here.
The material covered on the first 13 slides should be very familiar to readers of this blog. I touched on database diversity and the disk-speed barrier, after which I zoomed through a quick survey of the data warehouse DBMS market. But then I turned to material I’ve been working on more recently – practical advice directly on the subject of how to buy an analytic DBMS.
I started by proposing a seven-part segmentation self-assessment: Read more
| Categories: Buying processes, Data warehousing, Presentations | 10 Comments |
The “baseball bat” test for analytic DBMS and data warehouse appliances
More and more, I’m hearing about reliability, resilience, and uptime as criteria for choosing among data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Possible reasons include:
- More data warehouses are mission-critical now, with strong requirements for uptime.
- Maybe reliability is a bit of a luxury, but the products are otherwise good enough now that users can afford to be a bit pickier.
- Vendor marketing departments are blowing the whole subject out of proportion.
The truth probably lies in a combination of all these factors.
Making the most fuss on the subject is probably Aster Data, who like to talk at length both about mission-critical data warehouse applications and Aster’s approach to making them robust. But I’m also hearing from multiple vendors that proofs-of-concept now regularly include stress tests against failure, in what can be – and indeed has been – called the “baseball bat” test. Prospects are encouraged to go on a rampage, pulling out boards, disk drives, switches, power cables, and almost anything else their devious minds can come up with to cause computer carnage. Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing | 6 Comments |
Data warehouse load speeds in the spotlight
Syncsort and Vertica combined to devise and run a benchmark in which a data warehouse got loaded at 5 ½ terabytes per hour, which is several times faster than the figures used in any other vendors’ similar press releases in the past. Takeaways include:
- Syncsort isn’t just a mainframe sort utility company, but also does data integration. Who knew?
- Vertica’s design to overcome the traditional slow load speed of columnar DBMS works.
The latter is unsurprising. Back in February, I wrote at length about how Vertica makes rapid columnar updates. I don’t have a lot of subsequent new detail, but it made sense then and now. Read more
Interpreting the results of data warehouse proofs-of-concept (POCs)
When enterprises buy new brands of analytic DBMS, they almost always run proofs-of-concept (POCs) in the form of private benchmarks. The results are generally confidential, but that doesn’t keep a few stats from occasionally leaking out. As I noted recently, those leaks are problematic on multiple levels. For one thing, even if the results are to be taken as accurate and basically not-misleading, the way vendors describe them leaves a lot to be desired.
Here’s a concrete example to illustrate the point. One of my vendor clients sent over the stats from a recent POC, in which its data warehousing product was compared against a name-brand incumbent. 16 reports were run. The new product beat the old 16 out of 16 times. The lowest margin was a 1.8X speed-up, while the best was a whopping 335.5X.
My client helpfully took the “simple average” — i.e. the mean – of the 16 factors, and described this as an average 62X drubbing. But is that really fair? Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Buying processes, Data warehousing | 7 Comments |