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Reports of Perfectly-Balanced Hardware Configurations are Greatly Exaggerated
Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they've worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes...
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Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they've worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes:
Teradata ascribes considerable importance to a Virtual Storage technology whose main purpose is to allow mixing of heterogeneous storage devices in a single system. And the discussion rarely suggests that these parts will be in a rigid fixed relationship.
Netezza -- as Teradata keeps reminding me -- often sells boxes with the expectation that they won't be filled with data, so as to increase spindle count and hence performance.
Oracle/Sun have dropped some comments about Exadata being more flexibly configured going forward.
Kickfire's new "high-end" appliance lets you attach fairly arbitrary amounts of external storage.
And of course, software-only analytic DBMS vendors run their software in all sorts of hardware and storage environments.
What's more, the claim never made a lot of sense anyway. With the rarest of exceptions, even a single data warehouse's workload will contain different queries that strain different parts of the system in different ratios. Calculating the "ideal" hardware configuration for that single workload would be forbiddingly difficult. And even if one could calculate it, it almost surely would be different than another user's "ideal" configuration. How a single hardware configuration can be "ideally balanced" for a broad class of use cases boggles the imagination.Data warehouse appliance and software appliance vendors like to claim that they've worked out just the right hardware configuration(s), and that a single configuration is correct for a fairly broad range of workloads. But there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about that. Specific vendor evidence includes...
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