So after coming back from vacation and spending the first few days getting through emails and trying to catch up I was reminded about this specific blog from an ex colleague who also happens to be a Netezza user. It was the post by Daniel Abadi http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/. I thought overall it was accurate and written by someone who obviously has an eye for superior technology. The unfortunate part for me was the fact that Daniel was disappointed by the announcement because he felt it had been over-hyped and therefore took the wind out of the sails for him as far as excitement was concerned. He said: “All it means to the customers is that Netezza can now do some things that its competitors already can do. Sure lower prices and a better ability to handle mixed workloads are nice, but I was expecting something a little more radical”.As I contemplated his comments I wondered if it’s because of Netezza that we have gotten to a point where these types of improvements are just expected.
It wasn’t too long ago that I was adding a number of CPUs, a bunch of memory and more disks along with having a major project to completely redo the physical design of the database and underlying infrastructure. This required a load of resources and time with plans that had go/ no-go decision points to ensure we were back up by Monday AM with the execution usually starting on a Friday at the COB. I am leaving out a lot of detail here but you all know exactly what this is like and the costs associated - never mind how bad it sucks when you have to make that NO-GO decision. When you are successful your lucky to get a 30% overall improvement in performance.
For me, when you can make the claim that your next generation of database is 3X faster in processing than the previous generation - that was up to 100X faster then any of the competition - you are already introducing an improvement that no other database vendor in the world can claim. Is this radical? I think it is pretty damn radical when you can offer your customers a platform that offers 2-3X performance gains along with the improvements of handling mixed workloads at a drastically lower price and enabling endless usage possibilities with the change in architecture and move to Linux. After all which other vendor has the confidence to let you take a test drive as described at thislink: http://www.netezza.com/testdrive/and see for yourself? I don’t know of any - and I can tell you from personal experience, being a customer before being an employee, that once you get your hands on this amazing technology you will never give it back. Daniel wrote his blog on the day of the announcement, but I think after some time and reaction from the customer base he may feel a little different. I would suggest attending Enzee Universe to see and feel the excitement. Register today http://www.enzeeuniverse.com/.
All I can say is Twin fin is bitchen and the rest are biters.
Is it all over for Exaggerdata? As you can see in Phil’s post A “Fud-Machine” in Overdrivehis points further validate that Oracle is really in FUD overdrive as you read their ill informed and erratic commentsin the blogOracle approved post a_not_so_fabulous_new_release, just the mention of a non open Linux running on the FPGA’s is out there. Where did they get that information? Not from us I assure you because an FPGA has no operating system
I find it damn amusing that Oracle has to resort to outright misrepresentations to combat the technology of a company 100th their size. What I like is that they find it necessary to do it because we are kicking their ass in the field. So when you read all the FUD from the biggest database vendor in the world who has only gone into the appliance business because Netezza has validated the market, I can only say take it from where it comes. In my typical first liberated style as far as them being faster, cheaper and they don’t dare say simpler I say SHOW ME and I am not from Missouri.
Do not be fooled by imposters especially when they have more money to spread FUD then the government has thrown at the clunker buy back program. I challenge them to prove their claims and go head to head in a POC sponsored by a third party who can define a real world data warehouse test using real data and real analytics. Oracle talks about open standards and they are the least compliant with open standards and hope you use their proprietary features like PL/SQL so you cannot move. Open to Oracle is when everything you have is provided by Oracle. Not everyone is going to fall for their claims and I for one know without doubt that if I build against Netezza that moving it to another database is pretty straight forward. Not so with Oracle. There is a whole bunch of technology people out there that will not fall for their crap and you should continue to insist on all the things I have been talking about since I started the data liberators movement.
Holy @%$#!! You have to take a look at this video! There has been some talk out there about Netezza having something new on its way so I went on the hunt to find out. I decided to see if I could sneak into Netezza and get a look. I got in and I found something that was definitely not the standard-looking Netezza rack, but when I got close to take a look I was thrown out by some very big dude. What I can say is that I definitely caught a quick glimpse of something new and I am hearing some very cool things about advances in the technology. As someone who recognized a different technology when Netezza came along in 2002, let me tell you that something very exciting is about to be introduced and likely to be another game changer. You can be sure that I will continue to poke around but for now take a look-see at my attempt get a sneak preview.
We have finished our third and final podcast, focused on changing business requirements and how they are driving the demand for appliances. It was such a pleasure to record these and have the opportunity to gain insight from an industry expert like Mike Ferguson, who is focused specifically on business intelligence and business integration.
During this final session we had the opportunity to explore some of Mike’s perspectives on the future of appliances and analytics. How are increasing demands for information along with ever-growing data volumes going to impact the evolution of appliances? Will this become a simple process of purchasing a complete solution from one vendor that can be simply configured by the business user? Will all the physical components be integrated into a single data center rack with preinstalled software? Mike discusses his perspective on these questions and others in the podcast.
This road has been paved by Netezza who has taken the complexity out of physical database design and the infrastructure and people required to support it. One can only imagine the possibilities that lie ahead. Thanks again to Mike for his participation in this series and for discussing in details this changing and very exciting market of appliances and analytics.
The latest issue of Policy Truth is now available and I encourage you to take a look. Oracle would have you believe that its database machine has overcome the performance limitations experienced by its customers for years. The new system is, after all, 10x faster than existing Oracle implementations. Not so impressive considering competing appliances have been 10-100x faster than Oracle for years now!
In this uncertain economic climate, businesses are required to be more nimble than ever, using the most accurate data to maintain existing customer relationships, add new customers and operate as efficiently as ever are issues at the forefront of most corporate strategies.
That’s why, when you are evaluating appliances, take into consideration all of your options. As the user, you are in control - so get involved, demand the truth and full disclosure, ask the tough questions and require onsite testing. And if a vendor says “no” to any of your demands simply tell them “when the phone doesn’t ring, you’ll know it’s me”.
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.
In my last post I slammed Oracle for trying to be all databases to all people. And, as you start to think about it and put things in context, you must remember that Oracle became a leader because of its ability to run on any platform.
Oracle has publicized recently that it wants to be just like Cisco and Apple. But, how do you do this and still remain platform- agnostic? It’s impossible. The magic of these companies and others, like Netezza, who realize the value of appliances is that they have integrated the software, hardware and storage. This ensures that each component interoperates with maximized efficiency and optimal performance. I think we can all agree that being hardware agnostic is diametrically opposed to producing integrated appliances like: Apple, Cisco, Netezza and others.
Now let us take into account that Oracle has an optimized architecture for OLTP, but BI and analytics, as previously discussed, require a parallel architecture to provide the best possible performance. Now, eliminate the complexity of managing a massively parallel environment, which Netezza has achieved, and you have the lowest possible TCO. Netezza responded to increasing data volumes and growing demand for analytics because the “Oracle’s” of the world could not provide these capabilities cost effectively.
To the folks in Redwood Shores - maybe you should focus on what you do best and stop trying to be all databases to all people. You could certainly succeed with end-to-end offerings that provide turn-key operational environments. When it comes to analytics, though, pay attention to the comment from IBasis in a recent video interview - “Oracle is OK for people who do not know any better.”.
It is a sign of strength, not of weakness, to admit that you don’t know all the answers.
- John P. Loughrane
We’ve just recorded the second in the series of three podcasts featuring industry expert, Mike Ferguson, Managing Director of Intelligent Business Strategies, Ltd. Mike and I spent some time discussing in more detail the types of business requirements that appliances serve and how they have become a mainstream technology for the enterprise. Take a listen and if nothing else, you’ll gain some knowledge first hand from an expert whose opinions are driven by extensive research and intense interviews with real businesses who have real challenges.
I read a whitepaper recently from Teradata entitled “Exadata is still Oracle” http://exadata.teradatanow.com. This is no revelation, but it is does send an important message to potential buyers about being sure and evaluating other choices before buying one of Oracle’s proposed “magical” machines.
It does take into account the persistent question when considering Oracle - is the shared everything architecture the right choice for business intelligence and analytics? Recently Oracle has been highlighting wins of Exadata against TD and that is only because they can’t cite any technical wins against NZ. Teradata understood this challenge and realized that MPP was the key component to providing any kind of performance for analytics against large volumes of data. However in order to produce an appliance, the complexity of MPP needed to be hidden and, more importantly, the human intervention needed to be nearly eliminated to earn the name “appliance”. Teradata got it half right, but still requires very skilled personnel to implement and support the operational aspects of a Teradata implementation. Teradata were innovators for realizing that accessing and analyzing collected transactional and sub-transactional data would require a different approach that focused on parallelization and data scanning, but they have been unable to eliminate the complexity and peripheral costs associated with implementing and managing this sort of solution.
Now Oracle, with all its dominance and shared everything approach, has architected itself into an operational database corner. Starting with the wrong architecture has meant adding all kinds of objects and configuration tasks that created a monster of complexity. Is it even reasonable to think that one database can be multi-purposed without extreme complexity? If Oracle is serious and legitimately wants to compete in the business intelligence and analytics space they had better use a different product because one product cannot be optimal for both OLTP and ad-hoc, iterative analytics.
The innovation by Netezza revolutionized the method for I/O, which has always been the bottleneck of using a traditional data warehouse infrastructure. The use of an FPGA acting on the data as the disk is spinning has removed the latency created by moving data in blocks from storage - to server - to database memory before being able to respond. When you think about what makes Netezza superior to all other data warehouse systems, in the end it is simply a matter of moving the problem to the data and not moving the data to the problem.
All of that being said, I will conclude by saying that Oracle just does not get it! Teradata knew that MPP was critical. Netezza innovated even further with streaming I/O. When dealing with terabytes and now petabytes of data when it comes to moving data - less is always more. If you put a Netezza appliance on your data center floor to compare against either of these traditional data warehouse systems it will win hands-down. I encourage you to put aside the politics and make the right decision to provide your business with superior capabilities that truly do change the game of business intelligence.
Data-intensive organizations worldwide agree, appliances from Netezza are better suited to support changing workload requirements, flexibility and performance expectations. Take a look at what iBasis has to say about making the move to Netezza.
Launched in 2009, I founded the Data Liberation Movement(DLM) to ensure data rights for all. The DLM strives to educate users about the opportunities for simplified analytics, better performance, deeper analytics, fair pricing and transparency in testing. The opinions shared are my own and not those of Netezza Corporation, my employer. The DLM provides an open forum for technologists to exchange ideas and ask questions that will enable users to evaluate the components of business-critical analytic solutions and make the best decisions for their businesses.
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