Data warehouse appliances
Analysis of data warehouse appliances – i.e., of hardware/software bundles optimized for fast query and analysis of large volumes of (usually) relational data. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Parallelization
- Netezza
- DATAllegro
- Teradata
- Kickfire
- (in The Monash Report) Computing appliances in multiple domains
Philip Howard likes Calpont — again
The ratio of Philip Howard plaudits about Calpont to shipping products from Calpont has now doubled. Yet it also has remained the same. This is because it is a countably infinite number, namely a quotient whose denominator is zero. Last time around, he seemed to like their hardware strategy. This time around, he seems to like their lack of a hardware strategy. Be that as it may, the previously discussed nature of Calpont’s website hasn’t changed — one page, content-free, and misleading even so.
Oh, and it appears he broke the embargo on Paraccel. Bad Philip. Spank him, Kim.
| Categories: Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability | 1 Comment |
Big stuff coming from DATAllegro
In the literal sense, that is. While the details on what I wrote about this a few weeks ago* are still embargoed, I’m at liberty to drop a few more hints.
*Please also see DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost’s two comments added today to that thread.
DATAllegro systems these days basically consist of Dell servers talking to EMC disk arrays, with Cisco Infiniband to provide fast inter-server communication without significant CPU load. Well, if you decrease the number of Dell servers per EMC box, and increase the number of disks per EMC box, you can slash your per-terabyte price (possibly at the cost of lowering performance).
Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, DATAllegro | Leave a Comment |
Dataupia – low-end data warehouse appliances
It’s unfortunate that Dataupia has concepts like “Utopia” and “Satori” in its marketing, as those serve to obscure what the company really offers – data warehouse appliances designed for the market’s low end. Indeed, it seems that they’re currently very low-end, because they were just rolled out in May and are correspondingly immature.
Basic aspects include:
- Type 1 appliances, which most other data warehouse appliance vendors (Teradata excepted) have moved away from. And there actually seems to be very little special about the hardware design to take advantage of the proprietary opportunity.
- Apparently limited redistribution of intermediate query result sets – i.e, the “fat head” architecture most competitors have moved away from. But it’s not pure fat-head; there’s some data redistribution.
- General lack of partnerships with the obvious software players (but they’re working on that).
- Low price point ($19,500 per 2-terabyte module).
Beyond price, Dataupia’s one big positive differentiation vs. alternative products is that you don’t write SQL directly to a Dataupia appliance. Rather, you talk to it through the federation capability in your big-brand DBMS, such as Oracle or SQL*Server. Benefits of this approach include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 3 Comments |
DATAllegro heads for the high end
DATAllegro Stuart Frost called in for a prebriefing/feedback/consulting session. (I love advising my DBMS vendor clients on how to beat each other’s brains in. This was even more fun in the 1990s, when combat was generally more aggressive. Those were also the days when somebody would change jobs to an arch-rival and immediately explain how everything they’d told me before was utterly false …)
While I had Stuart on the phone, I did manage to extract some stuff I’m at liberty to use immediately. Here are the highlights: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata | 4 Comments |
Another short white paper on MPP data warehouse appliances
Following up on an earlier piece, DATAllegro has sponsored a second white paper on MPP data warehouse appliances. This one focuses specifically on DATAllegro’s move from Type 1 to Type 2 (i.e., virtual) appliances, via its new V3 product line. The basic tradeoffs of this move include:
- Superior hardware reliability
- Hardware lock-in shifted from DATAllegro to Dell, EMC, and Cisco
- Loss of specialized encryption acceleration
- Possibly a loss of some other performance optimization as well
- Better time-to-market in exploiting general Moore’s Law performance speedups
Actually, I didn’t make that last point explicitly in the paper, but it quite possibly trumps any performance disadvantages from the switch. And Moore’s Law itself certainly far outweighs any other performance-affecting factors.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro | Leave a Comment |
Deal prospects for data warehouse DBMS vendors
The fourth Monash Letter is now posted for Monash Advantage members (just 3 pages this time). It’s about forthcoming M&A in data warehouse DBMS, something that seems likely just because of the large number of current players. Some of the observations are:
- Oracle needs to buy somebody, because of its rather dire product problems at the data warehouse high end. And it’s very much in keeping with their recent behavior to do so.
- Teradata could be acquired sooner than people think. While there are tax considerations preventing an outright sale, these should be obviated if all of the current NCR is taken private. What’s more NCR minus Teradata is exactly the kind of healthy, slow-growth, niche company that private equity loves.
- DATAllegro is a natural merger partner for somebody. Their technical differentiation is almost DBMS-independent, so it could be easy to roll them into a larger overall product strategy. And they have enough market traction to have proved some non-trivial value.
- Kognitio seems desperate these days, with several odd or even underhanded marketing tactics. But they do have MPP bitmap software, something Sybase sorely lacks. So there’s an obvious potential combination between those two.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Kognitio, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata | 3 Comments |
What’s going on at Calpont?
It’s been quite a while since anything substantive-sounding emerged from Calpont. They now have an odd one-page web site, with essentially no substance other than a tagline suggesting they’re shipping product (not bloody likely) and the names, titles, and email addresses of the president and seven vice-presidents. Only two of those officers were listed on the May, 2006 version of the site. Does anybody have an idea what may or may not be going on?
(Quick refresher: Calpont was developing a SQL processing chip, and designing an appliance around it. Whether this appliance would have disks or be all in-memory changed from time to time, a flexibility that was made possible by the apparent fact that none of these boxes actually shipped.)
| Categories: Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing | 2 Comments |
HP Neoview — smoke or fire?
The consistently outstanding blog Serious About Consulting has a detailed article about HP Neoview. I must admit, however, to some skepticism about the Neoview project. Edit: As of September, 2008, that’s a dead link, and the blog has been replaced by spam junk. Part of this is just the fact that a data warehouse appliance outfit that’s never gotten around to briefing me — ever — clearly doesn’t have its marketing act together. 😉 Also, I’ve never heard much about them competitively from anybody except Greenplum.
That said — as Jerry Held reminded me in a recent Vertica-related call, there’s no cosmic architectural reason why they couldn’t make it work. And if anybody’s going to see HP first competitively, it’s going to be Sun/Greenplum and maybe Teradata, and I’ll confess to not having chatted with Teradata for approximately six months.
White paper — Index-Light MPP Data Warehousing
Many of my thoughts on data warehouse DBMS and appliances have been collected in a white paper, sponsored by DATAllegro. As in a couple of other white papers — collected here — I coined a phrase to describe the core concept: Index-light. MPP row-oriented data warehouse DBMSs certainly have indices, which are occasionally even used. But the approaches to database design that are supported or make sense to use are simply different for DATAllegro, Netezza (the most extreme example of all) or Teradata than for Oracle or Microsoft. And the differences are all in the direction of less indexing.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper. Please pardon the formatting; it reads better in the actual .PDF Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, EMC, Theory and architecture | 4 Comments |
Compression in columnar data stores
We have lively discussions going on columnar data stores vs. vertically partitioned row stores. Part is visible in the comment thread to a recent post. Other parts come in private comments from Stuart Frost of DATAllegro and Mike Stonebraker of Vertica et al.
To me, the most interesting part of what the Vertica guys are saying is twofold. One is that data compression just works better in column stores than row stores, perhaps by a factor of 3, because “the next thing in storage is the same data type, rather than a different one.” Frankly, although Mike has said this a couple of times, I haven’t understood yet why row stores can’t be smart enough to compress just as well. Yes, it’s a little harder than it would be in a columnar system; but I don’t see why the challenge would be insuperable.
The second part is even cooler, namely the claim that column stores allow the processors to operate directly on compressed data. But once again, I don’t see why row stores can’t do that too. For example, when you join via bitmapped indices, exactly what you’re doing is operating on highly-compressed data.