How to Buy an Analytic DBMS

I went to London for a couple of days recently, at the behest of Kognitio. Since I was in the neighborhood anyway, I visited their offices for a briefing. But the main driver for the trip was a seminar Thursday at which I was the featured speaker. As promised, the slides have been uploaded here.

The material covered on the first 13 slides should be very familiar to readers of this blog. I touched on database diversity and the disk-speed barrier, after which I zoomed through a quick survey of the data warehouse DBMS market. But then I turned to material I've been working on more recently - practical advice directly on the subject of how to buy an analytic DBMS.

I started by proposing a seven-part segmentation self-assessment:

That's my way of unpacking such general questions as:

• What are your deep-seated platform prejudices?
• What kinds of skilled administrative personnel do you have available?
• What are the key drivers of TCO in your shop?
• What are your real performance requirements?

Then I got even more direct, drilling down into the four-stage analytic DBMS buying process:

• Figure out what you're trying to buy
• Make a short list
• Do free POCs
• Evaluate and decide

The least obvious part of that drill-down was probably my points on making sure you actually were building the evaluation around the right use cases, and hence the right target queries. I plan to say much more about that part soon. Stay tuned.

Related link: The "Baseball Bat" Test I went to London for a couple of days recently, at the behest of Kognitio. The main driver for the trip was a seminar at which I was the featured speaker... I delivered practical advice on the subject of how to buy an analytic DBMS, starting with this seven-part self assessment...