Size, is it really important?
Well, there are several answers to the questions raised about size.
Firstly Sun and Greenplum did indeed announce a data warehouse appliance in July 2006. However it actually starts an order of magnitude lower than 100TB. To quote from the Greenplum press release of the time:
“The Data Warehouse Appliance will be available later this quarter. Initial configurations will deliver usable database capacities of 10, 40 and 100TB.”
Secondly, as far as I am aware, Kognitio has never made any pronouncements about the volume of data that either constitutes a data warehouse or should be put on a node.
The quote in the article is there to illustrate scalability not absolute volumes. It says:
‘In addition the architecture that Kognitio has elected to use has a very desirable side-effect: scalability. The company claims, for example, that “the query performance of a 100-server WX2 system with 10TB of data will be the same as that of a 10-server system with 1TB of data.” ’
There is certainly no inference that nodes are limited to 100Gb, the numbers are simply being used for illustrative purposes.
Thirdly, and most importantly, size is not important. The volume of data held in a data warehouse really isn’t that relevant, it is the quality of information that can be extracted which can make or break the project and, indeed, the enterprise. That is not to imply that large data warehouses cannot provide important information; of course they can. It’s just that the correlation between volume and importance is not absolute.
With reference to the other products, such as:
Kognitio
Greenplum
Netezza
DATallegro
and others
They are all doing very exciting work to push the boundaries of what can be achieved in data warehousing; we think it is important to give these products more exposure. In this article I focused on one of them but David Norfolk (my editor) and I were both keen to include references to some of the other products that are (as far as we are concerned) in the same space.