Greenplum
Analysis of data warehouse DBMS vendor Greenplum and its successor, EMC’s Data Computing division. Related subjects include:
- EMC, which bought Greenplum in 2010
- Data warehousing
- Data warehouse appliances
- PostgreSQL
GridSQL: What EnterpriseDB is and is not doing in Postgres-based MPP data warehousing
While talking with EnterpriseDB about today’s Postgres Plus announcements, I took the chance to clear up a point of confusion. Somebody told Seth Grimes that EnterpriseDB is out to compete with Greenplum, but that person was wrong. EnterpriseDB fondly hopes to manage multi-terabyte data warehouses, just as Oracle and Microsoft do with their respective general-purpose DBMS. However, EnterpriseDB is not going after the 10s-100s of terabytes sized DBMS that are the province of specialists such as Greenplum, Teradata, Netezza, or columnar DBMS vendors.
Even so, in GridSQL EnterpriseDB does seem to be open-sourcing MPP shared-nothing basics. There’s a lightweight optimizer that does a little (but only a little) more to minimize data movement beyond just optimizing queries on each node. And GridSQL knows how to replicate small tables across each node, a key aspect of many MPP designs. (Partition your facts; replicate your dimensions.)
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Greenplum, Open source, Parallelization | 1 Comment |
PostgreSQL can be used in a lot of different ways
The relational DBMS industry is filled with startups. In some way or other, most of them are based on or make use of the open source project PostgreSQL. (Not all, of course; exceptions include DATAllegro and Infobright, which are based on Ingres and MySQL respectively.) But how they use PostgreSQL varies greatly. Read more
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Greenplum, Open source, PostgreSQL, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
A quick survey of data warehouse management technology
There are at least 16 different vendors offering appliances and/or software that do database management primarily for analytic purposes.* That’s a lot to keep up with,. So I’ve thrown together a little overview of the analytic data management landscape, liberally salted with links to information about specific vendors, products, or technical issues. In some ways, this is a companion piece to my prior post about data warehouse appliance myths and realities.
*And that’s just the tabular/alphanumeric guys. Add in text search and you run the total a lot higher.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer traditional row-based relational DBMS architectures, but optimize them for analytic workloads. These include Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Dataupia, and SAS. All of those except SAS are wholly or primarily vendors of MPP/shared-nothing data warehouse appliances. EDIT: See the comment thread for a correction re Kognitio.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer column-based relational DBMS architectures. These include Sybase (with the Sybase IQ product, originally from Expressway), Vertica, ParAccel, Infobright, Kognitio (formerly White Cross), and Sand. Read more
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 |
One Greenplum customer — 35 terabytes and growing fast
I was at the Business Objects conference this week, and as usual went to very few sessions. But one I did stroll into was on “Managing Rapid Growth With the Right BI Strategy.” This was by Reliance Telecommunications, an outfit in India that is adding telecom subscribers very quickly, and consequently banging 100-150 gigs of data per day into a 35 terabyte warehouse.
The beginning of the talk astonished me, as the presenter seemed to be saying they were doing all this on Oracle. Hah. Oracle is what they moved away from; instead, they got Greenplum. I couldn’t get details; indeed, as a BI guy he was far enough away from DBMS to misspeak and say that Greenplum was brought in by ‘HP’, before quickly correcting himself when prompted. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Oracle, Specific users, Telecommunications | Leave a Comment |
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
Three ways Oracle or Microsoft could go MPP
I’ve been arguing for a while that Oracle and Microsoft are screwed in high-end data warehousing. The reason is that they’re stuck with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) architectures, while Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, and many others enjoy the benefits of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing). Thus, Teradata and DATAllegro boast installations in the hundreds of terabytes each, while Oracle and Microsoft users usually have to perform unnatural acts of hard-coded partitioning even to reach the 10 terabyte level.
That said, there are at least three ways Oracle and/or Microsoft could get out of this technical box:
1. They could buy or just partner with MPP vendors such as Dataupia, who offer plug-compatibility with their respective main DBMS.
2. They could buy whoever they want, plug-compatibility be damned. Presumably, they’d quickly add a light-weight data federation front-end to give the appearance of integration, then merge the products more closely over time.
3. They could develop or buy technology like DATAllegro’s, which essentially federates instances of an ordinary SMP DBMS across nodes of an MPP grid (Greenplum does something similar). I imagine that, for example, ripping Ingres out of DATAllegro and slotting in Oracle instead would be a pretty straightforward exercise; even without dramatic change to any of the optimizations, the resulting port would be something that ran pretty quickly on Day 1.
Bottom line: Oracle and Microsoft are hemorrhaging at the data warehouse high end now. But there are ways they could stanch the bleeding.
The four horsemen of data warehousing
I’ve been talking a lot to text mining vendors this week, as per a series of posts over on Text Technologies. Specifically, I’ve focused on the two with exhaustive extraction strategies, namely Attensity and Clarabridge. (Exhaustive extraction is Attensity’s term for separating the linguistic-analysis part of text mining from the DBMS-based BI/analytics part.)
So I asked each of Attensity and Clarabridge the side question as to which data warehouse software or appliances they were seeing. The answers were almost identical — Oracle, Microsoft SQL*Server, Teradata, and Netezza. One also mentioned MySQL and 2 HP prospects — but the HP sites were running NonStop SQL, not NeoView. Amazingly, there were no mentions of DB2. There also weren’t any mentions of the smaller specialist startups, such as DATAllegro, Greenplum, or Vertica.
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 |
Netezza under fire
I talk to a lot of data warehouse software and/or appliance start-ups. Naturally, they’re all gunning for Netezza, and regale me with stories about competitive replacements, competitive wins, benchmark wins, and the like. And there have been a couple of personnel departures too, notably development chief Bill Blake. Netezza insists this is because he got a CEO offer he couldn’t refuse, he’s still friendly with the company, development plans are entirely on track, and news of some sort is coming out in a few weeks. Also, Greenplum brags that its Asia/Pacific manager was snagged from Netezza.
On the other hand, Netezza claims lots of sales momentum, and that’s certainly consistent with what I hear from its competitors. Read more