All Points Blog has the news that Netezza is set to release a “spatial extension” to their Data Warehouse Appliance. You may not think you know much about Netezza, but know that their success keeps Larry Ellison up at night. There was some discussion on this blog about super fast geospatial analysis and what the target would be. I think basically Netezza is trying to solve problems that we currently can’t do with existing spatial databases in both scale and speed. I wouldn’t suspect seeing their product replacing Oracle Spatial or SQL Server, but for those who have the money to pay for the product this could help them answer questions they cannot do right now. For most of us, just sit back and marvel at what you could do if money was no option and know that in a year or two, much of this technology will be in your hands. Peter Batty says he’ll be blogging more about what exactly this means in the next week. Can’t wait to read it.
This is Star Trek quality spatial data analysis folks
4 Comments
I don’t know anything about Neteeza. But I shared this post with a friend and his response about Neteeza was so positive I thought I’d share it. He said “It’s actually way cheaper than Oracle because it just works. Everything is paid for at once. No OS or other software to buy, load and configure. No hardware guesses to make… that Oracle can hide behind when their s**t sucks. It comes with a power plug. You plug it in. It’s not marketing; it’s just true. JDBC driver . . . . no indexing to worry about. load the data, query the data. That’s my understanding, at least. Takes a few days to get going rather than years of tuning. The result is 100 times faster.”
They do have some details on their website, it is a data warehouse application + special hardware combination
http://www.netezza.com/products/dwa.aspx
I think on the data warehouse market, its competitors are teradata/db2, Oralce is not strong here traditionally.
On the other hand, it may be an overkill for most users.
The only thing I really know about it is that it was designed for high-end OLAP stuff, I think its column-oriented (I could be very wrong on that) and it derived from PostgreSQL in its early years and quickly split off that code-base. I’d be curious to know how much if any PostgreSQL code is left in it.
Hi James, have posted more info on my blog:
http://geothought.blogspot.com/2008/09/netezza-spatial.html
The first customer signed up, Guy Carpenter, reports an incredible 500x performance improvement (over Oracle Spatial) in their hurricane risk analysis application!!