Crunching the Numbers on Big Data
What’s so big about Big Data? It’s probably bigger than you think.
For some time now, the specialty data warehouse (DW) has been a technology proposition in search of a market. DW appliance pioneer Netezza Inc. — acquired by IBM Corp. in mid-2010 — hemorrhaged cash for the first few years of its existence. (Netezza enjoyed its first yearly profit 18 months after its IPO.)
Ditto for DATAllegro Corp., which Microsoft Corp. picked up 28 months ago. At the time of its acquisition, in fact, DATAllegro’s customer base consisted of less than a half-dozen shops.
Something happened in 2007 and 2008, however. The specialty DW found itself a market opportunity: Big Data.
Two years on, it’s now obvious what’s so big about Big Data: it’s bigger than you think.
The Backstory on Big Data
The traditional data warehouse — powered, in most cases, by a commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) database package — just isn’t up to the task of crunching Big Data. What’s needed is either a row-based data store powered by massively parallel processing (MPP) engines, or — even better, according to some — an MPP-based columnar data stores.
Notionally dispassionate industry analysts even concede as much. “The analytical techniques and data management structures of the past no longer work in this new era of big data,” concluded Wayne Eckerson, former director of education and research with The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), in TDWI’s recent Big Data Analytics Checklist Report.
Not only has the DW space seen an influx of new competitors — companies such as Aster Data Systems Inc., InfoBright Corp., ParAccel Inc., and Vertica Inc. — but computing giants Oracle Corp. (which introduced Exadata, the Oracle Database Machine, specifically to target Big Data), Microsoft (which tapped DATAllegro to power a massively parallel version of its SQL Server database), IBM Corp. (which acquired Netezza), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (which positions its Neoview platform as a Teradata-like DW replacement) have also jockeyed to reposition themselves. Over the same period, DW mainstay Teradata Corp. went public and introduced its first branded DW appliances.
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