Blogs
It seems a lifetime ago now, but since this is my first post of the new year i will allow myself a little backward look to the best bit of Christmas: watching 3 family films on Christmas day (with family): Bartok the Magnificent, Cabaret & A Night in Casablanca.
You’re supposed to enter the new year serene, focused, positive, filled with plans and schemes. Well that’s all very well but first to purge a little irritant from 2010. Now far be it from me to describe Oracle as a little irritant, but a thought did occur to me when i read about Oracle’s $10m challenge. (it’s expired now so don’t bother following the onward link). It expired pretty quickly after it was launched; maybe people were getting close to succeeding.
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.
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Technology is transforming the way we do business, but good business decisions never go out of style.
As they have for years, effective CIOs continue to balance risk against reward before investing IT budget to replace an older technology.
Most markets support one or two dominant vendors, challenged by nimbler innovators skillfully bringing game-changing products to market at faster pace than the 800 pound gorillas. Alexis Xydias of Bloomberg illustrates a dramatic example of this phenomenon in the consumer electronics business with Nokia and Apple (click on the image below for higher resolution).
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I’ve been learning more about Netezza’s spatial data capabilities. It’s been a fairly specialized option up to now, but with the next release of the TwinFin software, which majors on heavy -weight in-database analytics, spatial data processing becomes available to all our customers.
When I was looking at examples of spatial data analysis I found this, which I think is the first historical example of spatial data solving a real-world problem; I don’t think Netezza can claim any credit for this one. It is stunning how obvious the solution is, when you see the image. But then I thought about it a little, and I realised, yeah, it’s obvious because Dr. Snow had already theorised that the water sources were the problem.
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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.
I’ve been at The 2010 TDWI World Conference in San Diego this week, where the theme is "agile BI that delivers data (I would use the term ‘insights’) at the speed of thought.” Timing is everything when it comes to making decisions – and influencing other to make decisions we’d like to see.
We’ve all experienced Red Car Syndrome at some point or another. You test drive a red car. You like it. Suddenly, you start noticing red cars everywhere – not because the number of red cars has increased, but because the experience of driving a red car is now personalized. Online advertisers use Red Car Syndrome to connect consumers with the products they genuinely want, as I was reminded first-hand recently. While searching for kitchen fixtures online, I noticed that many of the ads featured a pair of pricey fixtures that initially caught our eye, but that we had rejected as exceeding our budget. But the ads seemed to know our tastes better than we did, and ultimately we succumbed and made the purchase.
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The "Intelligent Economy" is much more than a trendy buzz phrase or the name of a business school seminar.
It's the new reality for enterprises today.
The Intelligent Economy is about fundamentally changing the way we view our businesses and our customers, about inviting change when we decide change is needed – but also about recognizing what we do that makes sense and valuing it accordingly.
I mentioned in my previous post that Netezza is excited about our partnership with Cloudera and Hadoop because we’ve already seen some of our customers benefit from the synergy of Hadoop and Netezza TwinFin™ technologies working together.
As I noted, these types of strategies play to the strengths of both technologies and roughly break down into two categories: 1) the use of a Hadoop Cluster for data ingestion, and 2) using a Hadoop Cluster for long-term data retention, which I’m addressing today.

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Two things before I begin:
- I’ll begin this posting with a call for inputs. Below I will list a few of the most common Hadoop/Netezza co-existence deployment patterns we have seen to date. But I would like to hear from others. As you see the continuing deployment of Hadoop in the enterprise and as the Second Wave of TwinFin™ comes on with the advanced analytics capabilities of i-Class, how do you see the evolving deployment patterns happening in your environment?
- A special hat-tip to Krishnan Parasuraman, Netezza’s Chief Architect for our Digital Media group, for his excellent help in aiding and abetting this post! I have used his guidance gratefully and (with his permission) stolen freely from some of his inputs.
You may have noticed a partnership announcement made by Cloudera and Netezza late last week. Together with Cloudera, Netezza will open up data movement and transformation between Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop and the Netezza family of appliances applications and data flows for integration of the two systems. We expect that our partnership with Cloudera, together with the Hadoop support in Netezza’s i-Class™ set of advanced analytics capabilities that are included as part of the upcoming release 6.0 software release, will lead to some very innovative and expansive applications for our customers and for both companies.
News broke on Tuesday that EMC plans to acquire Greenplum to focus on data warehousing and analytics on “big data”. The idea is that by doing so, EMC is officially throwing its hat into the competitive ring for the ‘Data Warehouse Appliance’ (DWA) market – something of a defensive mechanism now that virtually all of the major data warehouse vendors are now selling their own versions of a DWA – and consequently greatly reducing sales pull-through of EMC storage for data warehouse deployments.
Some referred to the merger as “a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas” and others hailed it as follows, “the market has shifted as of late moving toward integrated appliances and this move gives EMC a very important arrow in its quiver” and labeled Greenplum as a purveyor of “very high performance database systems”.
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