Blogs

Two Gartner research reports covering data warehouse appliances are now available for download: “Are Data Warehouse Appliances in Your Future? Plan On It!” and “Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2010.”

From my reading of the former, I’m challenged to identify a situation when Gartner would suggest a data warehouse appliance should not be considered. The latter report suggests risks are reduced by buying from “a larger supplier of more mature products.” Given that Netezza created the original data warehouse appliance (and TwinFin is our fourth generation product) we claim the most mature product in the market.

This is what greeted me on my return from the IBM Information On Demand show in Las Vegas, like an early “Trick or Treat” gift on the cusp of Halloween. On Thursday, our good friends at Oracle had launched a new ad in their “traditional spot” at the bottom of page one of the Wall Street Journal (in photo at right). And on catching the ad in the morning, our receptionist Maureen had had the great good sense not to pollute our lobby by putting the paper out in the waiting area.

And both Netezza and Teradata figured prominently in the ad. “Stunning,” it said. “Wiped the floor,” it said. “300x faster,” it said. And all from a report by the reputable Wall Street firm, Piper Jaffray. Now exactly what was all this about? It wasn’t a question of “if” our friends from Redwood Shores were stretching the truth, but exactly “how.”

I’m at Oracle Openworld , now with added JavaOne, in a Netezza shirt after many occasions when I’ve attended in an Oracle shirt. It felt a little odd for the first hour or two. The place is a zoo, but then it’s been like that for years; it must take a huge amount of focus on the part of attendees to extract the agenda that has most value for them. And it’s a big challenge for specialist vendors like Netezza to get onto the agendas of the attendees that we think ought to come see us. In 2008 and 2009 Larry Ellison did a lot of that for us in his keynotes, positioning Netezza as the leader that Exadata sought to challenge.

In a recent blog, Greg Rahn of Oracle responded to Phil’s “Oracle Exadata and Netezza TwinFin Compared” eBook; before commenting on an Oracle engineer’s views, I’ll restate the eBook’s larger themes.

Exadata connects Oracle’s RAC database, its architecture designed for online transaction processing (OLTP), via a fast network to a massively parallel processing storage tier. As an OLTP database paired with a specialized storage subsystem, tuning Exadata to function as a data warehouse is complicated and demands skilled, highly trained, experienced technical staff. Mitigating the shortcoming of an OLTP database pressed into service as an analytic database with expensive network and storage makes Exadata costly: to acquire; to design, tune and maintain as an optimally-configured data warehouse; to run in the data center.