Database Reference
In-Depth Information
warehousing by integrating the database, processing, and storage components
in a flexible, compact, purpose-built, and optimized system for analytical
workloads. This innovative platform was built to deliver an industry-leading
price-performance ratio with appliance simplicity. As a purpose-built appli-
ance for high-speed Big Data analytics, its power comes not from the most
powerful and expensive components (which would increase the slope of its
cost-benefit curve) but from how the right components are assembled and
work together to maximize performance. In short, the goal wasn't to build a
supercomputer, but rather an elegantly designed system to address common-
place bottlenecks with the unequalled ability to perform analytics. Netezza
did this by combining massively parallel processing (MPP) stream and multi-
core CPUs with Netezza's unique hardware acceleration (we refer to this as
Netezza's secret sauce) to minimize disk I/O bottlenecks and deliver perfor-
mance and expert tuning that much more expensive systems could never
match, or even approach. We want to clarify the word
streams
in the previous
sentence. In this context, we are talking about streaming data from database
components on disk into memory for processing. You will learn about streams
that reference continuous processing of data in motion using InfoSphere
Streams in Chapter 6.
It's important to note that Netezza didn't take an old system with known
shortcomings and balance it with a storage tier. It was built from the ground
up, specifically for running complex analytics on large volumes of structured
data. As an easy-to-use appliance, the system delivers its phenomenal results
out of the box, with no indexing or tuning required. Appliance simplicity
extends to application development, enabling rapid innovation and the abil-
ity to bring high-performance analytics to the widest range of users and pro-
cesses.
For users and their organizations, it means the best intelligence to all
who seek it, even as demands escalate from all directions.
Looking back at the history of Netezza and today's Big Data era, we think
it's safe to assert that Netezza took the CFO/CIO discussion from “spending
money to save money,” to “spending money to make money”: it handed
businesses, both large and small, the ability to democratize deep analytics,
while flattening the cost curve that was once associated with this domain.
In this chapter we're going to get a little more technical than the previous
chapters you've read. This will allow us to better explain concepts and illus-
trate the “secret sauce” that's made the industry-leading Netezza technology
so special.
