Blue Chip Blog
Hacking Vertica?
I love innovation because of both the rewards and challenges that it brings. I have a passion for technology and love to experiment. I guess that I have grown up a little bit. Instead of taking my toaster apart, I simply watch the TV show “How it’s Made” .
Netezza Paved the Way
Netezza did something revolutionary in the Data Warehouse space. They revolutionized, simplified, and packaged parallelism in a way that was just not done before. They simply got it right. Think about it. Netezza offered an extremely fast product with standards based SQL and connectivity at a price Teradata wouldn’t try to beat.
Database in the Clouds?
I am struggling with this one. For VLDB’s, I can’t say I subscribe to the cloud databases like EC2, SimpleDB, etc.. I love the idea of throttling up or down the capacity on demand but I am not sure it is practical in the query and reporting sense.
If I had a transactional system like Facebook, MySpace, Travelocity, Expedia, it would make much more sense for me. The data requirements are large but the data is accumulated over time, transaction by single transaction. Ad hoc queries, reporting, and analytics that happen on VLDB’s, usually, or at least, should not be performed against operational transaction based systems. There is usually an extract of the transactional data and it is housed in either a more suitable schema or better yet or more suitable VLDB technology.
…and this database is Just Right
I have been fortunate to have created data warehouses in Oracle, Teradata, Netezza, SQL Server and Vertica. (I did a POC with Greenplum when it was called Metapa but it was not quite ready for prime time.)
I have never been able to achieve performance on multi-terabyte databases using SMP (Symmetrical Multi Processing) servers and OLTP databases. In my opinion, the relational/OLTP databases like Oracle, SQLServer, MYSql, etc.. are just the wrong tool for adhoc queries, analytics and reporting of VLDB’s (very large databases). The results I obtained when utilizing MPP have been staggering when compared to the response times of query and analytics of OLTP databases.
Syncsort SI Certification
Syncsort now has a System Integrator Certification available for DMExpress. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to the training and just received my certification. I must say that I am thoroughly impressedwith how far the DMExpress product has matured since the Syncsort Case Study I published a few years ago.
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