I did not forget about Sybase IQ, When I first had the opportunity to come across them, I did not see MPP as being the underlying architecture. At that time, they still had many components of their technology that was shared and could be considered a potential bottleneck. Things may have changed since I did my eval, but at that time, Column Store – Yes, Shared Nothing/MPP – No. As a result, I took them off my VLDB and MPP watch list.

Charlie

You ask some great questions. I am going to do a little research and see what I can find.

What I do know is that this effort involved three core technologies. DMExpress, HP Blade System C-Class, and Vertica. The DMExpress PR is here -> http://www.bcsolution.com/2009/05/syncsort-world-record/ – From what I understand, they were all extremely excited from the results.

I find Syncsort to be and extremely reputable brand. For over 30 years they have provided rock solid technology in the very large data space. I have only worked with them during the past 10 years but remember their advertising campaigns in the late 80’s.

So I believe you will find that Syncsort can stand behind their claims. They have some clients with enormous data deploys that I am sure have run through weekends.

I will see what I can find out.

Charlie

1. Who judges this world record and what are the qualifying criteria? Does it just depend on which “independent” analyst is looking at what solution at a particular point in time?

2. Who held this “world record” previously – does Vertica even know or are they guessing? In which case, do they really know they’ve beaten it?

3. The most obvious point. Nice performance over an hour in a controlled lab environment. But what sort of comparable stats can Vertica produce for a very large production environment (100 TB+) over a sustained period (i.e. weeks/months/years) – assuming they have such a production environment. And not the marketing-speak terms of peak performance, but TB/hr in continued, 24/7, mixed workload. There are systems out there loading 2TB/hr in real time into something as mainstream as Oracle 10gR2 (peaking at 5x that in busy hours), so is this really that remarkable or just more hollow marketing bluster from the niche players?

Thank you for your insight.
Charlie

I’m sorry for being picky about this but making inaccurate claims is a pet peeve of mine.

I reread your post and went back to the audit report to review section 4.2 a few more times. I believe your point is valid enough that the blog should be clarified. I have adjusted the blog above.

Thanks for pointing it out.
Charlie

Have you reviewed the Audit report? It is very clear with regard to the Transaction Council’s TPC-H Benchmark that it was not an instance of the TPC-H benchmark but rather an instance of the load performance portion of the benchmark. Section 4.2 Benchmark Definition. The audit report goes into great detail about using DBGEN and ALL the players in the field have the opportunity to do exactly what they did to disprove the claim.

If have an audit report, benchmark, or similar report that you can disprove the Press Release, I would really love to see it. I have not seen any formal rebuttal from TPC, Netezza, Sybase, Teradata, or Paraccel but would welcome the post.

Thanks

Syncsort and Vertica broke the world TPC record for data loads

This is a false statement. There is no TPC benchmark for data loads. They used the datagen tool for TPC-H, but that is the only association with TPC.