Teradata: Oracle, IBM analytics play is no threat

Data warehousing technology for private corporate cloud

By Eric Lai | Computerworld US
Published: 10:48 GMT, 21 October 09

Business intelligence vendor Teradata is not worried by Oracle's and IBM's recent sabre rattling, saying the vendors' respective technologies remain fundamentally unsuited for high-performance analytics.

Teradata is outlining its cloud-computing strategy including an internal cloud service and a public offering via Amazon Web Services. In addition, Teradata is rolling out an appliance it says will provide a big performance boost.

Oracle announced version 2 of its Exadata data warehousing appliance last month, with CEO Larry Ellison reportedly saying that Oracle is installing the faster, cheaper Sun Microsystems-based appliance "within the Teradata installed base".

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Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer for Teradata, which is hosting its annual PARTNERs conference in Washington this week, claimed that Oracle's alleged customer wins have been mostly confined to "uncontested" situations, such as customers running the Oracle database on Hewlett-Packard servers that are being switched or upgraded to the Exadata appliance.

"There hasn't been a whole lot of head-to-head. In the few times we have competed, we've had a very high win rate," he said.

The reason, McDonald said, is that the Oracle database was built for transaction processing, not analytics. Real application clusters (RACs), intended to enable Oracle database to scale out, remain a Band-aid solution, he said.

"Oracle tries to throw a lot of hardware and CPUs at the problem, but it's fundamentally still a transactional database," McDonald said, meaning it has "I/O problems and resource contention."

IBM earlier this month announced a data warehousing bundle involving its DB2 database software running on top of its Power servers in conjunction with the new pureScale clustering feature for faster, larger grids.

Whatever IBM's marketing may say, DB2 still has "very similar" problems as Oracle, McDonald said, due to its heritage in online transaction processing (OLTP). These are problems not faced by Teradata's massively parallel platform (MPP), he said, and evidenced by customers operating data warehouses with more than a petabyte of data.

McDonald said there are several new members of Teradata's elite club of "Petabyte Power Players," which he declined to name, as well as double the 35 customers with data warehouses in the 100 TB-plus range it had last year.

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