So I am looking for someone that can help me out. In reading the transcript from Oracle’s earnings call I noticed that Larry highlighted a single win of Exaggerdata against Netezza. I also noticed that he mentioned in some cases the queries ran 100 times faster than the traditional Oracle environment. He never did mention any comparison of the speed directly against Netezza. Being an early user of the platform, I personally had queries that ran thousands of times faster than they did in Oracle and that was on the first generation Netezza appliance in 2003. My tests were done by creating tables, loading data and executing queries. This was all done in a matter of hours. No indexing, no complicated partitioning strategy, no storage design and all the other crap that is required with traditional databases.

Is anyone else wondering why there is no direct comparison to timings on Netezza? Is anyone interested to know why a 23 billion dollar company would be so eager to mention a single win against a 200 million dollar appliance company? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to know how many times the smaller database appliance company beat Oracle? Well I can tell you this - it is a bigger number than 1 and continues to grow. Oracle may be 100 times our size but they will never be 100 times faster than Netezza.

Personally, I am a little suspicious of the claims. We should all pay close attention to the positioning and statements made about how well they compete against the first and only true data appliance company. Let us not lose sight of what an appliance is. According to the dictionary the definition it is an instrument, apparatus, or device for a particular purpose or use. With that I will say the Oracle database software is built to serve multiple purposes, and as I have written in the past, until you change the underlying architecture to take complete advantage of the hardware it is integrated with you will never produce a true appliance. So do not be fooled by imposters and really take some time to test thoroughly on-site. Do not let vendors do the testing because when they do it without your folks at least watching over the whole process they will cheat and you will be blindsided by the complexity when you have to implement for real.

I may work for Netezza but I have only worked for two product companies in my whole career. The first was Oracle - after I evaluated the product and recommended it be purchased while at one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world and knew then that this small database company was going to be a leader. I made a tremendous living fixing implementations of Oracle where the performance problems were preventing additional processing and hurting the productivity of analysis and reporting that was crucial to making business decisions. The second, as you know, was Netezza and after I implemented it I decided I needed to work for Netezza because they would absolutely be the leader in providing purpose-built data appliances that allow businesses to compete on analytics.

Question everything, do not take a vendor’s word on capabilities that could have a huge impact on your business and the bottom line. Prove it to yourself and do it on-site.

Netezza is changing the business of intelligence. Do not be fooled by those who are only using the word appliance for something that does not have the characteristics of the dictionary definition.

First Liberated