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 this link: 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.

- First Liberated

Definitions found at   http://rippinh2o.com/

Bitchen - 1.Cool awesome. That wave’s bitchen(that wave’s awesome) 2. totally sick and awesome

Biter   - Someone who copies (bites) off everything you do –aka- annoying ass people.