Nope, commodity hardware will win out. If the proprietary hardware is better, it will be incorporated into the commodity machines (over time) and be accessible from software that it replaces. Anyway, the line between hardware and software blurs with configurable firmware (e.g. FPGAs and hybrid ASICs). Chips are getting cheaper to create or to merge IP cores. Definitely not true in graphics (despite some vendor claims to the contrary) or physics processors.

The only true common denominator is the all mighty DOLLAR. Take a million dollar oracle system against a million dollar ‘X’ vendor. I’m talking hardware, software, environmentals… total cost of ownership…etc. Then you will truly see price/performance. I don’t care if one vendor has 100 more processors… if the cost was the same!

I think what you might find is a software-based company like a Greenplum, will come out in the wash on top. Someone that leverages commodity hardware, where CPU speed and innovation is out-pacing the speed of which a hardware vendor like Netezza and Teradata can compete with.

Software vendors will ALWAYS have an edge. Netezza’s hardware is 2-4 years old at best. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good product and has exposed monopolistic DB pricing, but it’s not the way. Proprietary hardware will never win out in my opinion.

At the end of the day, this exciting new market has made the industry that much stronger and has given many options to customers.

P.S.

If I was a betting man I’d bet that the I/O ingestion bandwidth was likely more on the order of 9.5X (2 4GFC HBAs vs 108 SPUS)… but I don’t know. Nonetheless, there is no way 8 USIV procs can ingest more than 2GB/s. When I say ingest I mean running an Oracle query with filtration/projection and even a light join as opposed to some I/O subsystem stimulation trick like dd(1).

As an aside, just because a SPU has an old 5w PPC doesn’t put it at a deficit. The total package in the SPU is well suited to data-rich processing given the limited rate at which data is scanned (simple SATA drive). They might have a balance issue with these components scanning, say, a 15K RPM 6Gb SAS drive. Time will tell.

The views expressed in this comment are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. The views and opinions expressed by others on this comment thread are theirs, not mine.

Thanks for the comments. Always good to get experiences first hand.

An average 54x improvement on a NPS 10100 (108 SPUs) over a Sun Fire E4900 Server with 8 UltraSPARC IV processors. As you mentioned, I would not call that much of a comparison. It does really make you think what they are comparing to when they claim 100x, 200x or 400x. Data warehousing has really become an arms race of compute power and I/O bandwidth.

I’d be interested to know if the PowerPC processors that Netezza uses (they currently use the 440GX) have gotten much faster since 2003. The reason I wonder, is that in April 2003, the AMD Opteron™ processor was introduced which contained the x86-64 instruction set (now known as AMD64). This processor allowed 64-bit Linux to run on a commodity server. Since then, we’ve seen Intel get into the 64-bit space with EMT64 (now known as Intel 64) as well as CPUs go from single core, to muti-core. These platforms have made Linux a significant player in the enterprise. Quad core processors are now available and eight core will be on its tails. This has drastically increased the compute power that one can get in a server, and it will keep increasing. Intel is starting to roll out its latest-generation microarchitecture (Nehalem) and the Nehalem-EP processors will arrive in 2009 (Intel Roadmap Overview August 20th 2008). The initial benchmark findings are starting to leak out. In fact, TechRadar says :

…we can exclusively reveal that the upcoming dual-socket server variant of the Nehalem architecture is so fast it’s almost silly.

I hope Netezza is ready for the race. It sure looks like it will be a good one.

This is a very interesting and thought provoking article. I wanted to provide some perspective as a former Oracle DBA and a current Netezza customer. The company I work for recently migrated a 12TB Oracle database running a Sun 4900 with 8 CPUs to a Netezza NPS 10100 system. We have seen an average increase in query performance of 54x in our environment. That being said, the comparison of an 8 CPU system to a 108 CPU system isn’t a fair comparison in my mind. The real driving factor for us to move away from Oracle (we are otherwise a completely Oracle “shop”) was the combination of performance improvement and cost. In order for us to have upgraded our Oracle database server to something that would have provided the same level of performance that the NPS provides, we would have had to spend on the order of 5x the amount of money. To our thinking, that just didn’t make sense. So, while I definitely agree that I would like to see benchmarks between Netezza and the “latest and greatest” from other vendors, I would suggest that cost (and I would be the first to say “Total Cost”, including migration costs, support costs, etc.) should also be a factor. If it costs 5x the money to build an Oracle system that provides the same level of performance that an NPS provides, that would be worth understanding. I would like to emphasize, as well, that our purchase was made well before the announcement of the Oracle Exadata product, though my understanding is that box would have still cost at least 2x what we spent on Netezza and I have no idea how performance would compare. Lastly, to be clear, I am not affiliated with Netezza in any way, other than being a reasonably satisfied customer. Thanks for the article and causing me to think a lot about these issues.

Mark Boyd

There is no reason to be mystified. If DW Appliance vendor XYZ is spouting off about a query processing speed-up of, say, X, just plug the values into the following magic decoder ring. Quote me on this, performance increase X is the product of:

1. Executing on a platform with X-fold storage bandwidth
2. Executing on a platform with X-fold processor bandwidth
3. The query being measured manipulated 1/Xth the amount of data
4. Some combination of items 1 through 3

Any reasonable vendor will gladly itemize for you where they get their magical performance gains. Just ask them, you might learn more about them than you thought.

BTW, has anyone bothered to read the Oracle EULA wording regarding citing of benchmark results? I have.

The views expressed in this comment are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. The views and opinions expressed by others on this comment thread are theirs, not mine.

Thanks for the lengthy comment and pitch.

The reason I (and many others) feel these benchmarketing claims are silly is because they are not a comparison of equals. I don’t see Car and Driver compare the 2009 Subaru Impreza WRX to the 2000 Honda Civic Si. They compare the same model year. Most any database company can claim they are 10-100x faster than something. The strength of the claim will obviously depend on what that something is. Thus far the Netezza list is very unimpressive and quite dated as well (as you mentioned).

So why is it that there are no NPS 10000 series performance claims? Even Netezza presentations I’ve seen given in 2008, still reference pre NPS 10000 series hardware which arrived May 2005 and was then extended in December 2006, so the full lineup has been in place for two years.

In most every customer benchmark I’ve done there has been a 10-100x or more performance increase over the existing system. Sometime query performance tops 1000x (yes, really!). In fact, some numbers from a recent customer POC on the HP Oracle Database Machine were well above 100x (like several times more). I guess the Oracle marketing team can use the 10-100x or more claim as well, as could most anyone (and seems they are!). I believe Oracle’s 10x pitch is a bit more believable than the overly optimistic 100x pitch. Who knows, after more numbers are available, that number could go up. After all, the beta customers saw up to 72x on less than half of a HP Oracle Database Machine.

By the way, thanks for the free advertising of the HP Oracle Database Machine on the Netezza website. A good effort in spreading FUD, but cool. I guess that’s the marketing games companies play.

Netezza is not in the business of misleading prospective customers, but in demonstrating the performance, value and simplicity that our data warehouse appliances have to offer our customers. The performance numbers quoted by us are the findings of prospective Netezza users and Netezza is NOT involved in the running of the tests on other vendors’ systems.

With regard to the competitive systems under test in these customer benchmark (or POC) tests, the tests nearly always include results achieved by the customer running the same test set on its deployed system. Sometimes that system is at or approaching its end-of-life, but it is also frequently a relatively new deployment (less than 2 years) that has reached some critical constraint such as scalability, operational complexity and/or inability to serve particular applications needs without a major refresh. In any event, that incumbent system is typically as finely-tuned as it must be for production purposes, completely under the control of the customer. It’s true that the incumbent system’s performance is the most common set of comparative results for Netezza to be privy to.

However it is also true that such POC tests usually involve at least one competitor system, which I can only presume is the best possible system available from the competition to respond to the customer’s system & purchase constraints.

As for the customer benchmark/POC testing process itself, performance numbers quoted by us are the findings of prospective Netezza users. Because our systems are so easily deployed, we encourage prospective buyers to test our systems at their site, using their queries, running against their data based on their own workload.

Unlike vendors who attempt to hide their systems’ installation, tuning and operational complexity by running tests in their own controlled test/demo environment, Netezza provides the customer visibility into the POC process, from delivery on the customer’s loading dock to installation, data loading and through completion of the final customer benchmark tests. This type of benchmark testing allows the customer to more accurately predict how the various competing systems will behave in their own production environment. Netezza is also not the only vendor in the industry to believe the currently agreed-upon TPC suite of benchmarks for data warehouse systems is not at all a good predictor for actual performance in a customer’s deployed environment.

Unfortunately, while the Netezza PowerPoint deck you referenced was from October ’07, the customer benchmark data included in it was from much earlier. The NPS models from those examples represent samples from Netezza’s 1st and 2nd generation systems; neither of which, themselves have been sold since March 2006 at the latest and some of the NPS systems in those results were from as far in the past as 2003 or early 2004. For instance, Netezza stopped selling the NPS 8100 and 8400 model systems as early as the 1st half of 2004.

While one could understandably quibble with the data shown in those old charts, one can hardly argue with the results achieved. Netezza continues to enjoy a very high success rate in terms of prospect-to-customer conversions using the on-site customer benchmark process and certainly we compete against all of the major data warehouse vendors in the marketplace for this business, Oracle included. I’ll ensure that the terminology we use on the Netezza website continues to be clear and accurate, but Netezza feels comfortable in its claims to 10-100X relative performance. Thanks.

Regards,
–Phil Francisco
VP, Product Management & Marketing
Netezza Corporation