Netezza on Oracle Database Machine

"For over five years, Oracle users have been sharing with Netezza their concerns about the performance of Oracle as either an enterprise data warehouse or for specific analytic applications. And as data volumes grow, analytics become more complex, users demand faster response and cost reduction initiatives become rampant, Oracle users have simply been unable to keep up. So much so, in fact that over 100 of these users turned to Netezza and our data warehouse appliances for a solution.

"The new Database Machine is Oracle’s response to Netezza. Like Netezza did some seven years before, Oracle has now realized that an architecture where SQL processing is carried out close to the disk yields all sorts of performance gains. Data not required in a query is filtered out at the source and is prevented from causing a bottleneck between storage and the database where the complex processing is carried out. And just like Netezza did, Oracle has also recognized the benefits of massively parallel processing.

"Netezza employs a performance-optimized 1:1 disk to processor relationship while the Exadata nodes from Oracle are organized with eight processor cores ‘sharing’ 12 disk drives. Netezza has also put much more sophisticated processing capabilities into each of those 1,000 processors, or more suitably referred to as ‘intelligent storage nodes’.

"As a first generation machine, Exadata is primitive and is limited to carrying out simple SQL projection operations within the storage. The bulk of processing is still carried out in the database itself and, as a consequence, costly amounts of raw, unprocessed information are sent to the SMP host processors in the Database Machine for further processing. By comparison, the Netezza Performance Server (NPS) system typically performs well over 95% of all of the work required to complete a given query response within the massively parallel array of 1,000 intelligent storage nodes, adding to the performance benefit.

"All of the above leads to higher performance in the NPS system. While Netezza makes claims of 100x performance gains, it is not uncommon to see performance differences as large as 200x to even 400x or more when compared to existing Oracle systems. Oracle’s 10x performance claim is weak in comparison.

"The NPS system is fully extensible, and complex user-defined functions can be executed within Netezza’s massively parallel storage array. A sophisticated programmer’s workbench allows functions to be written quickly and easily with the massively parallel considerations being handled automatically by Netezza. Netezza customers all over the world are benefitting from this, which results in game-changing breakthroughs in performance even over an already high-performing vanilla Netezza implementation. Today, there are over 100 partners who have written advanced analytics functions for risk simulation, dynamic re-pricing for telecommunications, customer scoring and complex transformational logic, fuzzy name matching for intelligence and fraud detection and others, that take advantage of this capability.

"Netezza is supplied as a single system ready-to-go in less than two days. This has a significant impact on time to value (TTV) which is important in today’s economy. In contrast, the Database Machine is supplied by two different companies, dispatched piecemeal on separate days. When all the parts arrive on site, you can request an engineer to come and set it all up. As a piecemeal solution, implementation is no different to that of a regular Oracle set-up: time consuming, expensive, inefficient and painfully slow.

"Because Netezza’s ANSII standard SQL RDBMS was designed to run Netezza’s unique hardware architecture, it does not need the complex performance tuning mechanisms that you find in Oracle. This results in administrators of the system and the database having to deal with and maintain, literally, thousands fewer objects in the system. As a consequence, a key aspect of Netezza is simplicity. Netezza systems are pre-installed, pre-built, pre-configured, require minimal administration and run orders of magnitude faster than Oracle.