ParAccel
Analysis of columnar data warehouse DBMS vendor ParAccel, maker of PADB (ParAccel Analytic DataBase). Related subjects include:
Many kinds of memory-centric data management
I’m frequently asked to generalize in some way about in-memory or memory-centric data management. I can start:
- The desire for human real-time interactive response naturally leads to keeping data in RAM.
- Many databases will be ever cheaper to put into RAM over time, thanks to Moore’s Law. (Most) traditional databases will eventually wind up in RAM.
- However, there will be exceptions, mainly on the machine-generated side. Where data creation and RAM data storage are getting cheaper at similar rates … well, the overall cost of RAM storage may not significantly decline.
Getting more specific than that is hard, however, because:
- The possibilities for in-memory data storage are as numerous and varied as those for disk.
- The individual technologies and products for in-memory storage are much less mature than those for disk.
- Solid-state options such as flash just confuse things further.
Consider, for example, some of the in-memory data management ideas kicking around. Read more
Comments on the analytic DBMS industry and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for same
This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out.* I shall now comment, just as I did on the 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants, to varying extents. To frame the discussion, let me start by saying:
- In general, I regard Gartner Magic Quadrants as a bad use of good research.
- Illustrating the uselessness of — or at least poor execution on — the overall quadrant metaphor, a large majority of the vendors covered are lined up near the line x = y, each outpacing the one below in both of the quadrant’s dimensions.
- I find fewer specifics to disagree with in this Gartner Magic Quadrant than in previous year’s versions. Two factors jump to mind as possible reasons:
- This year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is somewhat less ambitious than others; while it gives as much company detail as its predecessors, it doesn’t add as much discussion of overall trends. So there’s less to (potentially) disagree with.
- Merv Adrian is now at Gartner.
- Whatever the problems may be with Gartner’s approach, the whole thing comes out better than do Forrester’s failed imitations.
*As of February, 2012 — and surely for many months thereafter — Teradata is graciously paying for a link to the report.
Specific company comments, roughly in line with Gartner’s rough single-dimensional rank ordering, include: Read more
Eight kinds of analytic database (Part 1)
Analytic data management technology has blossomed, leading to many questions along the lines of “So which products should I use for which category of problem?” The old EDW/data mart dichotomy is hopelessly outdated for that purpose, and adding a third category for “big data” is little help.
Let’s try eight categories instead. While no categorization is ever perfect, these each have at least some degree of technical homogeneity. Figuring out which types of analytic database you have or need — and in most cases you’ll need several — is a great early step in your analytic technology planning. Read more
The Vertica story (with soundbites!)
I’ve blogged separately that:
- Vertica has a bunch of customers, including seven with 1 or more petabytes of data each.
- Vertica has progressed down the analytic platform path, with Monday’s release of Vertica 5.0.
And of course you know:
- Vertica (the product) is columnar, MPP, and fast.*
- Vertica (the company) was recently acquired by HP.**
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, ParAccel, Parallelization, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics
Last April, I asked some columnar DBMS vendors to share customer metrics. They answered, but it took until now to iron out a couple of details. Overall, the answers are pretty impressive. Read more
Updating our vendor client disclosures
Edit: This disclosure has been superseded by a March, 2012 version.
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
Comments on the Gartner 2010/2011 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant
Edit: Comments on the February, 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — and on the companies reviewed in it — are now up.
The Gartner 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant is out. I shall now comment, just as I did to varying degrees on the 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrants.
Note: Links to Gartner Magic Quadrants tend to be unstable. Please alert me if any problems arise; I’ll edit accordingly.
In my comments on the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant, I observed that Gartner’s “completeness of vision” scores were generally pretty reasonable, but their “ability to execute” rankings were somewhat bizarre; the same remains true this year. For example, Gartner ranks Ingres higher by that metric than Vertica, Aster Data, ParAccel, or Infobright. Yet each of those companies is growing nicely and delivering products that meet serious cutting-edge analytic DBMS needs, neither of which has been true of Ingres since about 1987. Read more
ParAccel PADB technical notes
I posted last October about PADB (ParAccel Analytic DataBase), but held back on various topics since PADB 3.0 was still under NDA. By the time PADB 3.0 was released, I was on blogging hiatus. Let’s do a bit of ParAccel catch-up now.
One big part of PADB 3.0 was an analytics extensibility framework. If we match PADB against my recent analytic computing system checklist, Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, EMC, MapReduce, ParAccel, Parallelization, Storage | 2 Comments |
Choices in analytic computing system design
When I posted a long list of architectural options for analytic DBMS, I left a couple of IOUs in for missing parts. One was in the area of what is sometimes called advanced-analytics functionality, which roughly speaking means aspects of analytic database management systems that are not directly related to conventional* SQL queries.
*Main examples of “conventional” = filtering, simple aggregrations.
The point of such functionality is generally twofold. First, it helps you execute analytic algorithms with high performance, due to reducing data movement and/or executing the analytics in parallel. Second, it helps you create and execute sophisticated analytic processes with (relatively) little effort.
For now, I’m going to refer to an analytic RDBMS that has been extended by advanced-analytics functionality as an analytic computing system, rather than as some kind of “platform,” although I suspect the latter term is more likely to wind up winning. So far, there have been five major categories of subsystem or add-on module that contribute to making an analytic DBMS a more fully-fledged analytic computing system:
- SQL extensions. Examples include SQL-2003 analytics (notably windowing), or vendor-specific temporal functionality.
- A framework for UDFs (User-Defined Functions) to further extend SQL. At its core, a relational DBMS is a big SQL interpreter. SQL, while powerful, only does a limited number of things. User-Defined Functions are new predicates in the SQL language that do additional things.
- An execution engine for analytic processes that is less coupled to the SQL engine than a pure UDF framework might be. The two main approaches are MapReduce (e.g. Aster Data) and general C++ libraries (Netezza, ParAccel).
- Libraries of pre-built analytic processes. Commonly included are statistics, (other machine learning), general linear algebra, and Monte Carlo analysis. Some of these functions are fully parallelized (perhaps tens per vendor). Others just play nicely with the vendor’s execution framework, in that a separate copy can be run on each node (up to thousands per vendor, for those who bring in open source statistics libraries).
- Development tools such as integrated development environments (IDEs). Aster keeps trying to convince me that having built a nice Eclipse IDE is a major competitive differentiation.
| Categories: Aster Data, MapReduce, Netezza, ParAccel, Parallelization, Predictive modeling and advanced analytics, Workload management | 8 Comments |
Notes and links October 22, 2010
A number of recent posts have had good comments. This time, I won’t call them out individually.
Evidently Mike Olson of Cloudera is still telling the machine-generated data story, exactly as he should be. The Information Arbitrage/IA Ventures folks said something similar, focusing specifically on “sensor data” …
… and, even better, went on to say: Read more