Data Warehousing Appliances IT Central Station

DATA WAREHOUSING
APPLIANCES
A PEEK INTO WHAT REAL USERS REALLY THINK
2014
IT Central Station helps enterprise tech professionals by providing

A comprehensive list of all Several real user reviews Specific information to help
enterprise level data from enterprise tech enterprise tech professionals
warehousing appliances. professionals and vendor select the product that is
information. right for their specific needs.
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ABOUT THIS REPORT
This report is comprised of a comprehensive list of all enterprise level data

warehousing appliances. We have also included several real user reviews posted
on ITCentralStation.com. The reviewers of these products have been validated as
real users based on their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that they provide reliable
opinions and not those of product vendors.
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give
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Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community
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VENDOR & PRODUCT LIST
VENDOR PRODUCT
Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse
Oracle Exadata
HP Vertica
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse
Teradata Teradata
Infobright Infobright
EMC Greenplum
Teradata Aster Data Map Reduce
IBM InfoSphere Warehouse
actian Ingres
IBM Netezza
actian ParAccel
SAND SAND
IBM Smart Analytics System
SAP Sybase IQ
Kognitio WX2
SQL Server Data Warehouse
Vendor: Microsoft www.microsoft.com

REVIEW BY A REAL USER WHAT REAL USERS ARE
SAYING…
ambapo Verified by IT Central Station
CEO, Tech Services Company with 500-5000
Employees “We examined SAP Data
PROS Warehouse and IBM Data
Warehouse but SQL Data
• SQL Data Warehouse provides our Warehouse provided a more
organization with a way to access all corporate extensive way of integrating
data in a uniform way. data.”
• SQL Data Warehouse allows us to manage our
database using network or hierarchical “It offers high performance & low
database systems rather than solely relying on cost Data Warehousing over the
relational DBMSs. industry’s latest hardware.”
• It supports the bottom-up process of data
warehouse creation where several data marts
can be joined to form one big warehouse. I
found this very handy especially where a few
teams are involved.
CONS
• Data cleaning involves the use of special
software to help the cleaning team uniformly
match attributes from the target source data to
its destination.
• It is expensive. SQL Data Warehouse is not
supported by all versions of SQL Server such
as the Express version and therefore becomes
unavailable to many limiting its acquisition and
use.
• Uses a different approach to databases than
that used in relational DBMS hence posing a
challenge to novices.
SUMMARY
It comes as a special tool of cleaning data through
the data transformation process where data is
extracted from many sources before it is
assembled and consolidated to form a single
database. This is the main factor that led my
company to choose SQL Data Warehouse as the
special tool to consolidate relational databases.
Close examination was done on SAP Data
Warehouse and IBM Data Warehouse but SQL
Data Warehouse provided a more extensive way
of integrating data. I personally value the role that
SQL Data Warehouse has contributed in achieving
the goals of business intelligence. Users will to
generate timely reports from huge databases as
well as database cleaning should embrace this
provision.

Exadata
Vendor: Oracle www.oracle.com

SAYING…
patrickpitre Verified by IT Central Station
BI Expert, Retailer with 5000+ Employees
PROS “Fast processing for a pretty
penny.”
• Hardware is easy to deploy.
• The system is faster than comparable data “Its large memory capability and
models on traditional architecture. parallelism potential has given a
big boost.”
• Oracle 11g holds the record for the fastest
OLTP.
• Scalability is easy – just add additional nodes “It's not ‘one size fits all’.”
or Oracle’s storage expansion rack.
• Integration with the Oracle product line that
has a lot of depth.
CONS
• Performance on some queries may
dramatically change for the worst and need
extensive tuning.
• The optimizer is not well understood by
anyone (including Oracle support) which leads
to the first con.
• The storage management software, while has
gotten better since the 1st generation of the
product, has a tendency to be buggy.
• Requires a lot of administration by DBAs.
• 1st generation Exadatas on the HP hardware
are crap.
• They are expensive – both licensing and
hardware and not all of the database software
is included in the Exadata price. Single full rack
database machine and storage with full
support is around 1.5 million (doesn’t include
the year over year licensing).
SUMMARY
The main thing to point out with this hardware is
that it is purpose built. While Oracle might market
it as the single database appliance to end all, it is
still not a best practice to combined mixed
workloads (OLTP/OLAP) into the same physical or
logical architecture. Performance to an extent in
OLAP is still driven by having an appropriate and
performing data model. Hardware will only provide
so much of a boost and is still driven by the logical
design of the database.
I would recommend Exadata if you are moving
from an Oracle legacy system. If you are looking to
move from another vendor, then the process is
going to be rather difficult in getting it to work on
Oracle. If you are building from the ground up,
then it depends on the budget you have to work
with.
REVIEW BY A REAL USER

Amin Adatia Verified by IT Central Station
Developer, Tech Services Company with 1-500
Employees
PROS
• Parallelism, Memory
• Storage Cell “intervention” for query
performance.
• We have a lot of documents to index and
search. Exadata, with its large memory
capability and parallelism potential has given a
big boost, (300+%) to indexing throughput. We
can see a potential for User Query
performance improvements but this needs a
“re-factoring” (re-write??) of the code.
CONS
• No built-in feature seems to be present for not
allowing the CPU to become overwhelmed and
crash the system. Oracle does (or should
know!) how much CPU and RAM is necessary
for the product to work. Why not just reserve
this “minimum” capacity?
• Spurious shutdowns, snapshots stop working.
• Whoever is the "Oracle Support" that does the
initial setup seems to think that one-size-fits-all
is the solution to every application
environment. Still seems to be the approach of
the 1980s that if the menu comes up then the
setup is complete. For all the money and
hoopla it is a disappointment to have to
struggle with memory issues when doing
simple tasks like adding large number of
partitions.
• There should be an option at install time to
deal with DW and OLTP environments. I dont
think that the training provided for "Exadata
Support" persons is adequate to make the
configuration modifications. So the "user" of
the Exadata is left to deal with a machine
configuration suitable for "oranges" when it is
really "apples" that are needed.
OVERALL
If you cannot consolidate into a single database
you are effectively spending a lot of money to get
no further ahead.

Vertica
Vendor: HP www.hp.com

SAYING…
itadmin Verified by IT Central Station
Head of Databases, Retailer
PROS “Great DW value for the money,
but needs better workload
• We use Vertica because it is a fast and reliable management.”
data warehousing tool and provides us a very
good data compression ratio.
“Great Platform.”
• As it can load a lot of data very quickly, it is
very helpful for our organization in managing
our VLDB.
• It has the lowest cost per TB compared to
other DW solutions.
• Provides us clustering for our commodity
hardware and a good data compression ratio
compared to other DW tools I've looked into.
• It is very scalable. We didn’t face any problems
in terms of installation.
• Allows concurrent users access. Our staff can
process and send query requests
simultaneously -- it responds to all requests
very efficiently.
• It is very easy to use! It also is good in
providing OLAP support to our database
system. We can also use traditional SQL
queries and tables.
CONS
• We can’t use Vertica as a transactional
database because it is unable to handle lot of
transactions.
• While copying tables straight across from
MYSQL, we observe poor performance.
Queries take more time for execution.
• Our team is challenged during peak loads
because of a lack of workload management
options.
• It doesn’t offer us any configuration options for
reducing the size of our database system and
limiting our resource usage.

NetWeaver Business Warehouse
Vendor: SAP www.sap.com

SAYING…
Joe Fernandes Verified by IT Central Station
IT Manager, Retailer with 5000+ Employees
PROS “ETL is valuable but more
standard extractors could be
• Data warehousing capabilities, ETL features, developed to avoid the need to
automation of data loads, cell calculation. develop custom ones.”
• Queries based on the Data warehouse have
enabled the Service department of the
organization to analyze data deeply and get
insights into daily inflow and revenue as well as
analyze data over time periods, various
models, model years, by customer segment,
etc.
• Customer service is very good
• Technical support is excellent
CONS
• I would like to see more standard extractors
that could be developed to avoid the need to
develop custom extractors.
• We had scalability issues due to lack of in
house expertise in performance optimization
for increased volumes of data.

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Give to Get
Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give
to Get”. Our rich community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your
participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well.
Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community
Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you
use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to
review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the
review.
If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would
greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.

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IT Central Station helps enterprise tech professionals by providing

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User reviews, candid discussions, and more for enterprise

The Internet has completely changed the way we

244 5th Avenue,

ABOUT THIS REPORT

This report is comprised of a comprehensive list of all enterprise level data

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse

Teradata Aster Data Map Reduce

IBM InfoSphere Warehouse

IBM Smart Analytics System

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

REVIEW BY A REAL USER

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

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