In the interest of full disclosure my employer is Netezza and at one time it was Oracle. I worked with Oracle software for over 20 years and a little about 15 years ago became very involved in Data Warehousing mostly with database marketing solutions. In 2002 I found Netezza and fell in love with the technology because it was simple and allowed me to focus on business value and data assets rather than a constant battle with performance and tuning.

Before I go into my feeling of Greg Rahn’s response to the Netezza eBook let me make something perfectly clear. If I were hired tomorrow to architect a very high volume OLTP system, Oracle would definitely be considered. These systems are highly complex and require the execution of millions of short transactions per day by millions of users and all the features that make Oracle so complex are needed to accommodate these transaction volumes and required response times.

These complexities are greatly reduced for Business Intelligence and Analytics if something is designed to specifically address them like Netezza. The complexities are an inherent part of Oracle because it was not designed for Analytics and therefore needs to be retrofitted to attack this specific area of processing that is becoming more and more important in the digital age compounded by the tremendous growth of data.

Now lets get the BLOG by Greg Rahn in response to Netezza eBook and Daniel Abadi - Defending Oracle Exadata. It is very clear to me in his response that Greg looks at these overly complex activities for implementation as a benefit and I guess most people that make a living dealing with those activities have blinders on when it comes to business value and benefits to the bottom line. For me the simplicity of Netezza was a godsend to the business and our analytical challenges. It freed up valuable resources to focus on driving business value and not putting myself or others in a position where because of the complex technology we were needed to keep shit running. This has absolutely no monetary or business value.

You need to be an engineer with a tremendous understanding of both infrastructure and Oracle software in order to make it work. With that said, I need to ask how many companies have access to a Greg Rahn who seems to be very talented that can handle these complexities and if you don’t what will it cost you to get them on board?

In my previous life I used Oracle and it was the complexities and need for very experienced people that led me to using Netezza for Analytic solutions. The DBA staff could now focus on getting real value out of the data to help improve business and the bottom line. My head started to spin as I went through the number of manuals just to understand the best approach to partitioning, indexing, striping and a slew of operational and physical design activities that need to be understood for producing an optimal configuration. Never mind the array of initializing parameters that also needed to be understood.

Lets just take one comment that Greg made:

Bottom line: There are numerous ways that Exadata can restrict the data that is set to the database servers and it’s likely that any query with any predicate restrictions can do so. Certainly it is possible even with the analytic question that Netezza mentions.

To me this says it all. Numerous ways implies that there is no simple right way to do this but is dependant on many other technical decisions related to physical design. Netezza is a true appliance and there just isn’t a hell of a lot to think about. I guess it all comes down to simplicity, cost and performance.

What I read in Greg’s response to Netezza makes me feel a whole lot better about my decision to move away from Oracle for DW and analytics and never look back. We used Oracle where it made sense for the business and not for the benefit of engineers.

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” – Alan Perlis

FirstLiberated

In looking at the results of this survey by Art Wittmann from Information Week you can take away from it what you will, but I would be very concerned if I was a customer or prospect thinking about Exadata as a solution.

The survey shows that an audience from six months ago was even more skeptical today. In February 7% had no interest in Exadata and today it is18%, Art mentions that every comment from SUN customers was the affect that support had gotten much worse. How important is support to you. How important is support to you? I am going to make a guess here that it is pretty damn important. So let’s get to the core of the problem. It is not necessarily the companies themselves but the approach to construction.

Sun/Oracle are taking two technologies that I think lot of people will say that each respective company have some great technology and produce what they like to dub an appliance in Exadata. The Exadata machine however is the integration of software and hardware that has been around for decades. This is nothing new or innovative. I did it for years and I am very sure many of you have. This is not the way to build a successful and game changing appliance. This is just a bunch of Oracle and Sun stuff in a cabinet.

Netezza built the software for the hardware from the ground up. They took some of the CPU tasks like restriction, projection and decompression on with innovation and put the code into an FPGA which is described very nicely HERE that eliminated the load from the CPU and allowed it to be used for the more intense processes like sorting and joining. Here is an excerpt that pretty much sums it up.

Typically thousands of operations can be performed in parallel on an FPGA computer during every clock cycle. Though the clock speed of FPGAs (20-80MHz) is lower than of current RISC systems (100-500MHz) the resulting speedup can be extremely high: in many applications like image processing, artificial neural networks, data encryption or string processing, speedups between 100 and 1000 have been reported. For some High Energy Physics trigger applications Enable++ outperforms high-end RISCs workstations by a factor around 1000.

My basic and simple point here is that an appliance is not the integration of existing technology to serve a purpose and in the Sun/Oracle case Exadata is touted as serving multiple purposes. An Appliance is something that is built from the ground up to solve a specific problem and Netezza has done just that.

I compel you to read this survey and make your own assessment as to whether the business should be bet on technology that does very little to decrease complexity while increasing cost with no significant benefit in processing. Of course as the title suggests support should be of major concern.

Today Phil Francisco posted his blog discussing the Four Fundamental Differences Between TwinFin and Exadata. I couldn’t agree more with his perspective and also his recognizing the paper by Rick Burns Exadata V2 is still Oracle, which I thought did an excellent job of pointing out the shortcomings of Exadata. I had the pleasure of working with Rick a number of years ago and he knows Oracle.

You have to download the e e-book Oracle Exadata and Netezza TwinFin Compared. It is a must read for those who think the Exadata machine is something special. As pointed out by Phil but in my own words, Oracle is trying to fit 5lbs of crap into a 1lb bag; taking a technology designed and developed over 30 years ago and attempting to retrofit it for processing that really didn’t exist in those days.

What it all comes down to and what matters most in my humble opinion and as Phil also points out are the four fundamental differences between TwinFin and Exadata.

1. True MPP vs. Hybrid “SMP-plus” approach.

2. Data Streaming with Hardware Assist vs. CPU-intensive Processing for Basic DB Operations

3. Deep Analytics Processing vs. Central Cluster-based Approach

4. No-Tuning-Required Simplicity vs. Complex Array of Knobs and Levers

There is nothing else like TwinFin in the marketplace and for those of you who believe the Oracle story that Exadata can perform both OLTP and DW processing on a single platform, they require two totally different architectures. For me this is common sense and I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

In the end it is common sense that will prevail. Do not take my word for it but in the spirit of data liberation, put it to the test. Demand transparent onsite testing! Demand straightforward pricing! Demand quick answers to complex questions! Demand faster performance! Demand deeper analytics! And most of all make your own decision based on your own hands-on experience.

Netezza insists on you using your data, your queries at your facility or theirs and offer you to take a Test Drive.

First Liberated

Today I was on Twitter and saw this tweet “We have purchased a Netezza…Talk about data liberation…It was incredible.” “Music to our ears! Thanks!” There are a couple of statements in this post http://ow.ly/2j1uX that say it all.”So we found the Netezza guys and they said you don’t need cubes.  What!?! NO CUBES!?!” and ”Our ETL process that we had built that took about 5 hours each night really isn’t needed anymore.”

When you think about data liberation this is exactly what it is all about. Taking terabytes of raw detail data and executing complex analytics and queries without the cumbersome task of designing building and maintaining summaries and cubes. The benefits are obvious. No need to know the question before it is asked. No need to understand access paths and build the appropriate indexes to insure decent speed of access to the data for the users who struggle every day with getting what they need from it. No need to figure out the complexities of mapping the data to the physical infrastructure and sizing that infrastructure properly tin an attempt to get some acceptable level of performance. The problem is however is when ad-hoc questions are asked that you didn’t design for. This brings the system to its knees. We know how much that sucks.

The NO’s is what we need to keep in mind. For every little thing you don’t need to do in providing real business intelligence and analytics to our end users is time that can be reallocated to more important functions that benefit the business.

Netezza was introduced in 2002 and it has truly made an impact in changing the way we utilize and gain value from our data assets. From loading to transforming to reporting and even providing capabilities to use SQL for generating results and streaming directly into complex analytic algorithms written in a variety of languages.

Netezza was breakthrough technology in 2002 and with TwinFin has advanced BI and analytics beyond what any other vendor is capable of. Do not forget that until Netezza came along there was no such thing as a database appliance. A truly plug and play environment. Since that time many companies have tried to produce what they call an appliance. IBM with the BCU and that has been pretty much a disaster. HP with NEOView. How much do you hear about that? Even EMC is trying to get in the game with the acquisition of GreenPlum. What was huge validation is that even Oracle realized the validity of the Netezza approach and validated it with Exadata. They just got the wrong damn architecture with SMP. Teradta I will give some credit because they do know the importance of MPP but what they call an appliance requires services that typically exceed the cost of the equipment. This gets to be pretty damn expensive.

Keep it simple and free yourself from the complexity of performance tuning, physical design and sizing complex infrastructure. Drive value for your business and have the freedom of analysis we all deserve. Be Liberated!! free your data to work for your business!! The answers are there and no question should be put aside out of fear or inability to execute. Question everything and do it all inside the box. Do it all with Netezza.

First Liberated.

 There is one mistake that I believe was the biggest made with a database technology. In 2001 when IBM bought Informix and put aside the most valuable asset XPS but I am sure they had something in mind. When this product was BETA in the mid 90’s I worked as an architect on building a retail marketing data warehouse solution at Fidelity Investments.  This was the point in my career that caused me to become focused on data warehousing solutions. I had worked with Oracle for over 20 years and realized during this XPS project that there was a simpler approach to building an Analytic solution. You did still need to understand the interaction of the hardware with the DBMS but the MPP architecture eliminated the complexities with making Oracle do something it wasn’t designed for.
 
With all the smart people at IBM they should have realized that the day of a completely bundled solutions for what would be one of the fastest growing market segments was quickly approaching. They always had the opportunity and technology for completely bundled solutions and there is no technical reason why OLTP solutions were not already bundled as a package. The reason of course, was software companies not wanting to be in the hardware business. Well, that has surely changed. Unfortunately IBM treated them as totally separate businesses.

The founders of Netezza had the foresight and put a thorn in the side of every DBMS vendors with a real threat that simplified and improved complex data processing for competing on analytics with the first and only built from the ground up appliance. The rest are built to look like an appliance but are not doing anything really innovative from a technology perspective which is a clear differentiator for Netezza.
 
According to Larry’s latest earnings announcement which I believe we need to take with a grain of salt, he seems to be beating IBM a lot which leads one to believe this is on the OLTP business front based on the small number of “wins” against Netezza and Teradata. Man – you’ve got to admire this guy’s exuberance. J Here is an excerpt.

“Now, back to Q4. Again, I said the competition has really shifted from companies like Teradata and Netezza to big IBM machines and the Q4 results bore that out. We beat IBM 30 times in Q4. We beat Teradata nine times in Q4, and we beat Netezza seven times in Q4. And we sold the Exadata machine into some of IBM’s largest and bluest accounts, including Bank of America, Carrefour the second largest retailer in the world behind Wal-Mart and Thomson Reuters.”

IBM without a doubt has the clout to compete on all fronts but should not be losing the OLTP business. On the analytic side they own SPSS which is a big hole for Oracle.J

IBM is on its third try of coming up with something that can compete on analytics. The appliance market is here to stay. What is the smart thing for IBM at this point? Do they continue to try and cobble solutions together that to date have not been able to dominate market share or do they look at other alternatives that get them there a whole lot faster?

This past Tuesday 7/6 EMC announced intentions to acquire Greenplum. Here is what Phil Francisio had to say. I need to spend a little more time thinking about this one. It seems like for this market they will need to use very high-end disk subsystems and that stuff is just too damn expensive. Today Curt Monash spoke to Ben Werther at Greenplum. It will be interesting to see what they come up with beyond the Cloud which I still don’t get all the hype about. I guess when it comes to running business critical solutions I am a control freak. The Cloud is just out there for me.

Larry has clearly put a target on IBM. They have the power and the resources to put him in his place and an opportunity to emerge the leader. I think there are a lot of us that would like nothing more than to see that happen. IBM has the technology and the people to compete in both the OLTP and Analytic Appliance market. If they are looking for ideas on the Analytic appliance front I have a few.

First Liberated

I read this article by Curt Monashwhere he mentions that” Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they’ve worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads.” In short I agree with Curt but I think he needs to have a better understanding of the vision (we call N Sight). Netezza gets it for sure!!

Then I ran across this study by IBM The New Voice of the CIO which represents the insights and vision of 2,500 CIOs from 78 countries and 19 industries. Pat Toole, CIO of IBM, said “CIOs are investing in business analytics capabilities to help them improve decision-making at all levels.”

Well, now I have to raise some points that I think are worth consideration. I also once again want to remind the readers that I am not an analyst. What I am, however, is someone that has extensive experience with database technology and many facets of data processing in general. And I do not speak for Netezza but I can surely speak of them because not only am I an employee but also a former user and someone who has lived database and processing solutions for thirty years - working directly with the business.

Let us take a look at several highlights from the aforementioned study.
1. 83% of respondents identified business intelligence and analytics, as the way they will enhance their organization’s competitiveness
Netezza from day one has said they have a purpose-built appliance for BI and analytics. The biggest challenges that are the hardest to process and optimize, but most valuable to the business are perfect for Netezza to tackle.. Let’s not forget that Netezza is the company that changed this industry forever. Whatever Netezza does, it keeps its roots in mind and does nothing to jeopardize its simplicity, ease of use and appliance differentiation.

2. 71% of CIOs are planning to make additional investments in risk management and compliance
Netezza understands this and with Mantra, a compliance package that is now included with Netezza TwinFin systems, Companies that are concerned about security and compliance with the combination can now collect and analyze data that will identify and in the future, predict, risks and violations of compliance-based on rules and profiles.

3. 76% of CIOs anticipate building a centralized infrastructure in the next five years
Once again an area that Netezza clearly has a vision on. Right off the website - “Our vision is for multiple appliances deployed in grids, globally scalable and manageable; of information management simplified, of data easily integrated, easily managed in a global analytic platform and easily exploited in analytic applications.” From my perspective, this alone demonstrates how Netezza appliances built to serve various purposes across the enterprise will allow for the integration, distribution, protection and use of our most valuable asset- data. Businesses can truly gain insight and sustain competitive edge in this dynamic business landscape.

 
What Relational database appliance or, for that matter, relational database software can process an algorithm on-stream against the data of three credit bureaus, containing records for every individual in the US and examine over 80 credit attributes with over 300 branch points to apply a score that identifies the best record - IN 20 MINUTES? This is just one example of how the simplicity of the Netezza appliance is used for processing that would typically be handled across a bunch of servers, a number of different software packages and people with different skills to achieve results. I won’t even discuss the complexity of the infrastructure and days of processing this would typically take.

The world is changing and we will see purpose-built solutions through innovation and partnerships that will be optimized for functions that have specific processing requirements. This, along with the surrounding connectors and certified partner tools to support a totally connected intelligent data infrastructure that will construct, distribute and allow end user consumption and utilization of the resulting smart data products, is the future of our data-driven world.Even Larry wants to be an appliance company but doesn’t agree that OLTP and analytic processing have different requirements especially in I/O and memory utilization.

To conclude, I agree with Curt but Netezza get’s it. Putting much more thought into the business problem and next to none into the processing of that problem is what Netezza enables for both database and non-database challenges. Watch out world -Netezza is here to stay and will continue to change the industry. Vision is what created Netezza and vision is what will keep our focus and resources on business value and results and away from complexity.

I was reading a post from my CEO Jim Baum Viewing Open World with an Open Mind. The general theme is exactly what I would expect from the CEO of a company that is clearly the leader in its space. As a matter of fact in my humble opinion Netezza is the only true appliance company and without a doubt the only producer of an analytic machine that meets the definition of an appliance according to Merriam-Webster - appliance – “a piece of equipment for adapting a tool or machine to a special purpose”. The other major characteristic of an appliance is simplicity. There should be very little to do other then make a few settings and hit the start button.  

I am looking for the individual that can show me any other appliance that you stand up on day one, load and query data on day two and immediately realize performance that is mind blowing without any tuning. There is none other than Netezza. Oracle is an appliance in assembly,  but not in functionality, and as such does not meet the definition. Think about it - does a refrigerator also cook your food?

Netezza gets this and continues to improve its capabilities to include new and powerful capabilities while maintaining the characteristics, operations and most importantly the simplicity of an appliance. Jim Baum is focused on the customer, their needs, and their satisfaction. This customer focus has been a core tenet of Netezza since the beginning when I was a customer – and bred into the culture by former CEO and Founder Jit Saxena who is today Chairman of the Board. Simplicity is core to the product and core to conducting business.

At different times in my career I  have been a  user ,  an employee and a  of course a  customer of Oracle. Oracle is reactionary for sure as demonstrated by my interaction  with them  in 2002 as a customer looking at Netezza for analytics. At that time I  suggested to  a senior executive at Oracle that they take a look at this technology because in reality Oracle did not have a good answer for dealing with large volumes of data in an analytic environment. His response to me was “Bob appliances are going nowhere”. No matter how you look at it Oracle took their eye off the ball and reacted to a market instead of planning for it. This is what differentiates Netezza from Oracle and the rest of the pack.

Jim wrote about   Netezza’s three areas of focus being  deeper, wider and higher analytics. Deeper is  especially  exciting. The ability to hide the parallelism from the developer who can build and execute non-database complex algorithms without  having to  deal with code that organizes and breaks up the data across a complex infrastructure  for performance is amazing. Wider will provide advancements that will take on the future of business intelligence and complex analytics as defined by the marketplace and implemented by the company that recognized a different approach was needed to service the demand for using data to find the cracks where the opportunity for additional revenue  may have fallen  through.  Higher is another game - changer and partners are beginning to produce and brand appliances from Netezza that contain end-to-end functionality for solving specific business analytic and reporting challenges without the need to deal with infrastructure. In the not too distant future we will see a fully connected intelligent data exchange that is defined by the business and requires very little technical and operations staff to deploy and manage.

Any business that needs to compete in today’s volatile business environment has got to use their data intelligently to make quick decisive decisions based on current customer actions to stay ahead of the pack. The smart ones are using Netezza and the rest will be. Too many technologists today think that the complexity is necessary and I am here to tell you that KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is still the best approach and the leader of SIMPLE is Netezza.

- First Liberated

Hey there it’s me, First Liberated, aka Bob Doyle and affectionately called BFD (a story for another day) by some old colleagues at Oracle and some who have sold to me as a customer of Oracle. You’ve got to love Larry. I always thought he was a pretty amazing guy with a great story and an incredible knack for messaging. During my days at Oracle I had a great respect for Ken Jacobs who is a pretty bright guy and I think he still holds the role of vice president of product strategy in Oracle’s server technologies division. I remember doing benchmarks and having opportunities to have direct conversations with Ken. I think I might have installed the first ALPHA code version for OPS on AIX in maybe 1989-1990 at a company in Rochester NY—telecommunications. I am really trying my memory on this one as it was a long time ago. There was also a time when I was involved in the initial testing of Oracle on DEC Unix with Scott and Steve Foote, brothers who were a pleasure to work with and in the minority as far as contacts I have stayed in touch with over my 30 years in this business and not sure where they ended up. Maybe they will see this and we can reconnect, that would be great.

So I need to be very clear and let you all know that I always did and always will believe that Oracle has produced a great database that was built and optimized for years based on OLTP. And, this was where the real business needs were until technology advanced to where data could be collected and the need for analytics began to grow beyond the capabilities of a shared everything architecture. Even Larry and Ken could not predict this change and re-architecting was not in the cards. Oracle tried to adjust but at the expense of complexity and added functionality that required understanding of how to use the same product for two totally different purposes when its core design was around transaction processing. If you have learned anything about me I am very much in favor of picking the right tool for the right job and with that said it really turns out that Oracle and Netezza could be an ideal solution for providing an Information Factory.
 
If Oracle is serious about being a hardware vendor and an appliance vendor then the perfect partner is Netezza to strengthen the Oracle position with a relationship that provides customers with a reference architecture for information management and delivery that services end-to-end seamless almost real time integration of corporate wide information into the appropriate environments for servicing the needs of the end user.  Recognizing what you do well and using partners to augment your weaknesses is what enforces your position with clients and establishes you as the thought leader in solving real world challenges. There is a real powerhouse here that just needs cooperation and recognition of the individual strengths by two very different architectures built for two very different types of processing. The truth be told, Oracle with its wide variety of software able to provide in-the-box core transactional processing needs for everyone and ability to integrate that data near real time into the Netezza appliance for servicing complex analytics would establish a kick-ass foundation for the Enterprise Information Factory. But in order for this to succeed, Oracle must to admit that inherently it is not built for Business Intelligence and analytics.

As for IBM, they make some damn good hardware, after all Netezza chose it. Recent press shows that Oracle has an eye on IBM and has issued a challenge. With this challenge issued by Larry I do have to wonder why Oracle included in its  rules this statement “Hardware associated with companies acquired by IBM after October 7, 2009 shall not be considered IBM hardware.” Is there something out there they are really worried about? I tend to read too much into stuff sometimes but it seems a little bit of an odd statement to make for a test that will be completed by January. How many acquisitions are finalized in 2 months?

Larry, you just need to pick your partners before what seems to be a fear becomes reality. We all want to win and compatibility with competition could change our world once again.
 
First Liberated

I recently read an article by Ryan Tate larry-ellison-cant-be-bothered-with-the-facts. We really do need to look at the brilliance behind the marketing that built a company that is almost 30 billion dollars and left customers burdened with trying to make the software meet the expectations that were set by Oracle.
 
With the recent passing of the anniversary of Exaggerdata and now Oracle has announced version 2 , the idea of mixing operational and analytic processing on the same infrastructure for me just does not seem like something a technologist would want to do. What technologist in their right mind would ever deploy the business critical life blood operational systems of the enterprise on one appliance that also supported business intelligence and analytics? If you know that person tell him/her that this isn’t really the best time to be in the unemployment lines. Is this what Oracle means when they say OLTP and Data Warehouse? Can someone please clarify for me exactly how they see Exaggerdata being used?  

 
This is the problem I have with Oracle as I mentioned in this be-all-that-you-can-be-but-can-you-be-everything-to-everybody Oracle has some great technology with some very smart people but it just comes down to SMP not cutting it for analytics on BIG data. Even Teradata got that part right.  Listen again as  Mark Saponar from IBasis says it very clearly “Oracle Exadata is OK for those who don’t know any better ” IBasis-discusses-the-benefits-of-moving-from-oracle-to-Netezza.
 
The FACT is that since the announcement of Exaggerdata Netezza has added FIFTY new customers who were all using Oracle for  analytics and realized that Netezza is a much better solution that reduces cost and dramatically improves analytic processing capabilities allowing these firms to gain a competitive advantage. 

What I can say without equivocation about Netezza is that they are by no means perfect, and of course I will remind everyone that I am an employee, but only because I recognized the value the Netezza technology brings to the market and wanted to be part of it. We deliver what we advertise and I am proud to be associated with the technology and the company. Netezza takes pride in maintaining the highest level of customer satisfaction and referenceability.
 
Now in the spirit of the data liberation movement I will ask the audience and please leave your comments . Would it be of value to have an indecently run benchmark designed specifically for analytic and DW activity? Would Teradata and Oracle be willing to participate? We need to insist on fair onsite testing, full transparency, clear simple pricing, ease of doing business and full disclosure.

First Liberated