The Competitive Market of Data Warehousing

Doug Henschen commented about the competitive market of Data Warehousing, in an article published in the Intelligent Enterprise, entitled Upstart Vendors Keep Data Warehousing Competitive, with several announcements from data warehousing upstart vendors at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) World Conference, happened this week in Las Vegas.

He wrote that taken individually, the headlines aren't earth shattering, but taken together, the announcements underscore that the data warehousing universe is expanding, with alternative providers getting stronger despite the pressures of a weak global economy. The announcements are:

- Aster Data: Aster Data nCluster 4.5, an upgrade of its core product featuring a combined SQL/MapReduce visual development environment, a suite of prebuilt analytics modules, support for Fusion-io flash-memory drives, and a new management console for optimizing query performance.

- ParAccel: support for solid state drives (SSDs) from Fusion-io (a move also announced today by Aster Data). SSDs replace spinning, mechanical disks with flash memory chips for faster performance. ParAccel is promising 15 times faster query performance with optional flash SSDs installed by the hardware supplier of the customer's choice.

- Kognitio: GroupM, a division of advertising giant WPP, has asked it to build an analytical environment to match and monitor advertising placements on global scale. GroupM operates in more than 80 countries, and data from these local operations will ultimately be fed into a centralized Kognitio database that will reportedly analyze almost one-third of the world's advertising spend across multiple media outlets.

- Vertica: upgrades including better workload and resource management features aimed at handling mixed query workloads and many more users.

Henschen commented that the data warehousing industry leaders have already embraced flash technology. Oracle put a huge emphasis on flash memory in the Sun-Oracle V2 upgrade of Exadata announced last October. Teradata's SSD-based Extreme Performance Server 4555 was also announced last October, and it's slated for general availability in the first half of this year. IBM has demonstrated an SSD-based test appliance, but it has yet to announce or ship a production SSD-enabled data warehouse appliance. Netezza has used the combination of competitive pricing and fast query performance to win more than 300 customers to date.

Despite the vendor consolidation in several IT categories, the data warehousing market is very competitive, and it is very good, mainly for the customers, that can choose the product that best suits you, to meet their ever increasing needs of data analysis.