Columnar Databases on the Upswing, TDWI Finds

Research announced by The Data Warehousing Institute indicates “an increasing adoption of columnar databases as the platform of choice for data warehousing and analytic applications.”

 

 

According to Philip Russom, senior manager, TDWI Research, a common complaint that TDWI hears from BI workers is that their data warehouse platform consists of a traditional DBMS and SMP hardware, both designed for transaction processing, not data warehousing.

 

 “Users are spending a significant amount of time and energy tweaking transactional platforms to get adequate performance for the type of queries and data volumes common in today’s data warehousing environments,” he said.

 

He says the search for something different “has led many of them to explore columnar databases, especially when they can be deployed in a Massively Parallel Processing architecture.”      

 

“It is clear why companies are adopting columnar database technology. Our survey research aligns with TDWI findings and indicates that more than 50 percent of companies have significant performance and scalability issues with their data warehousing and business intelligence applications,” noted ParAccel Vice President of Marketing Kim Stanick.

 

Last August, TMC reported that SAS (News - Alert) customer General Electric Rail Services was selected by The Data Warehousing Institute as a co-winner of its Enterprise BI Best Practices Award for 2008. GERS received the honor for deploying an information delivery solution with an enterprise BI portal that “meets a wide spectrum of user needs, resulting in improved business efficiency and significant financial savings,” according to the citation.

 

TDWI, represented by a panel of independent judges, chose GERS for its demonstrated excellence in building an enterprise-wide platform that provides intelligence and analytics from data spanning various source systems. The award also recognized the development, deployment and maintenance of BI applications that contributed to the company's success.