Netezza
Analysis of Netezza and its data warehouse appliances. Related subjects include:
The Netezza strategy for data shipping
I talked with Netezza today, and finally understand better why they don’t have node-to-node data shipping problems with only 1-gigabit (gigE) interconnects:
- Netezza boxes have lots of relatively small nodes, so all else being equal, each individual node has less communicating to do than, say, a DATAllegro node does.
- It’s not just just 1-gigabit. There’s a hierarchical communications architecture, and at one level in the hierarchy switches are talking to each other through 32 parallel 1-gigabit channels at a time.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Netezza | Leave a Comment |
Netezza has another big October quarter
Netezza reported a big October quarter, ahead of expectations. And official guidance for next quarter is essentially flat quarter-over-quarter, suggesting Q3 was indeed surprisingly big. However, Netezza’s year-over-year growth for Q3 was a little under 50%, suggesting the quarter wasn’t so remarkable after all. (Netezza has a January fiscal year.)
Tentative conclusion: Netezza just tends to have big October quarters, perhaps by timing sales cycles to finish soon after the late September user conference. If Netezza’s user conference ever moves to later in the fall, expect Q3 to be weak that year.
Netezza reported 18 new customers, double last year’s figure. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Kognitio, Netezza | 3 Comments |
Netezza cites three warehouses over 50 terabytes
Netezza is finally making it clear that they run some largish warehouses. Their latest press release cites Catalina Marketing, Epsilon, and NYSE Euronext as having 50+ terabytes each. I checked with Netezza’s Marketing VP Ellen Rubin, and she confirmed that those are clean figures — user data, single warehouses, etc. Ellen further tells me that Netezza’s total count of warehouses that big is “significantly more” than the 3 named in the release.
Of course, this makes sense, given that Netezza’s largest box, the NPS 10800, runs 100 terabytes. And Catalina was named as having bought a 10800 in a press release back in December, 2006. Read more
Gartner 2007 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems
February, 2011 edit: I’ve now commented on Gartner’s 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant as well.
It’s early autumn, the leaves are turning in New England, and Gartner has issued another Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS. (Edit: As of January, 2009, that link is dead but this one works.) The big winners vs. last year are Greenplum and, secondarily, Sybase. Teradata continues to lead. Oracle has also leapfrogged IBM, and there are various other minor adjustments as well, among repeat mentionees Netezza, DATAllegro, Sand, Kognitio, and MySQL. HP isn’t on the radar yet; ditto Vertica. Read more
Database management system architecture implications of an eventual move to solid-state memory
I’ve pointed out in the past that solid-state/Flash memory could be a good alternative to hard disks in PCs and enterprise systems alike. Well, when that happy day arrives, what will be some of the implications for database management software architecture?
- Compression will be even more important. Cost per terabyte of storage will spike up for that storage that is moved from disk to solid-state.
- The sequential-rather-than-random reading strategy of data warehouse appliance makers may become less relevant. The one way to get rid of the disk-speed bottleneck is to get rid of disks.
- DBMS will need to write data as rarely as possible. Solid-state memory tends to wear out if you keep writing over it. Assuming this problem gets better over time (if it doesn’t, this whole discussion is moot) but isn’t totally solved, architectures which have fewer writes are on the whole better.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Netezza, Solid-state memory, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Four anonymous Netezza fans
I just found a blog post asking about Netezza that elicited quite a few responses, including at least four that purported to be from people whose companies had selected Netezza in a POC (Proof Of Concept) bake-off. One says Netezza was super-fast, even over DATAllegro, and DATAllegro’s professional services were lacking. One says Netezza is 50X faster than traditional alternatives on some queries, but up to 2X slower on some others. Two others just expressed love (or at least commitment) without giving details.
I haven’t yet looked through the rest of the responses in the thread.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 3 Comments |
The Netezza Developer Network
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is: Read more
Notes from the Netezza user conference
EDIT: Big whoops, and apologies to Philip. I didn’t check the date, and what I linked to was last year’s article. That said, it read as if it could have been this year’s, which tells us something about the pace of Netezza’s information disclosure. Resulting errors of mine are left in place.
Netezza perennially annoys me by the secrecy with which it surrounds its information disclosure, especially at the annual user conference (just concluded). Essentially, except for what has also been separately disclosed, the whole thing is under NDA beyond the generality “We told you that we intend to improve our product by making more use of the FPGA.” Blech. That said, Philip Howard* has a long and — no surprise there! — upbeat article. So I’ll link to that, saving me some worries about what I myself am or am not allowed to say. E.g., I wouldn’t dare suggest — as Philip does — that Netezza’s zone maps (essentially, one-dimensional partitioning) could be enhanced going forward. And while I think Netezza has made strong efforts to tell the marketing stories Philip describes as being “hidden under a bushel,” I agree that — largely because of its self-defeating mania for secrecy — Netezza hasn’t done nearly as good a job of getting those messages accepted as it could have.
*Just to be clear — notwithstanding how much I tweak him for his exuberance, Philip seems to be a great guy, both in his publications and in person.
In general, much of what Philip wrote I would agree with. That said, let me hasten to point out some exceptions, including: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 2 Comments |
Market reach tidbits from Netezza’s conference call
I’ve been slow to notice a very useful service being provided by Seeking Alpha, namely transcripts of quarterly earnings conference calls. For example, the Netezza call on August 23 revealed that Netezza sells approximately as many systems per year as it has quota-carrying sales teams. Or maybe it’s closer to 2 sales per team, especially for the more experienced ones. More precisely, the numbers discussed were 6-15 sales per quarter, and 35 sales teams. Average deal size was $2.3 million; based on the earnings press release, that suggests 10-11 deals depending on how much service revenue (if any) was included.
And by the way, if Netezza does 6-15 sales per quarter, and has a much smaller average sale than DATAllegro, and has much more revenue than DATAllegro — well, it’s easy to understand why DATAllegro isn’t exhibiting a very long list of customers.
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| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Netezza | 1 Comment |
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