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Angry Databases

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Angry Databases

On April 19, 2011, Posted by , In Mike Pilcher, With No Comments

Angry Databases

Data warehouses consume data at an alarming rate, getting larger, fatter, greedier, and slower with each passing day. They hide themselves behind impenetrable walls of batch loads, data cleansing, index building, and data augmentation. And there they sit, chortling like an appliance salesperson, content that, no matter how many nodes you buy, you’ll never get your data out.

In other words, the pig has your eggs and it ain’t giving them back.

##Knocking your head against a wall

As part of the game, traditional vendors provide a variety of ways for you to throw money at piggish databases. Some are big, red, brute-force appliances. Others, small, blue, fragmented cubes. There are bright yellow, bolted-on column stores that are fast in short, unidirectional bursts. And indexing schemes from black to white that explode data volumes and blow away performance.

They offer you never-ending permutations to try and get to your data, and no matter how many you throw at the problem, you keep getting sent back to the slingshot, time and again.

##It’s not the player, it’s the game

There are times when it just doesn’t seem to matter what you do. You throw money and hardware and abstraction layers at your bloated warehouse, from tiny chicks to mighty eagles, and just when you think you’ve knocked down all the obstacles, another level pops up, harder and more challenging than the last. And another. And another.

And soon enough, in the eyes of your users, you go from 3 gold stars, to 2 gold stars, to “try again.”

##Change the rules

Getting players to launch endless trick birds at ever fatter pigs has made Rovio Mobile a fortune. Getting IT departments to throw endless amounts of time, money, and resources at the wrong technology has made traditional vendors an even bigger fortune.

The only way to beat them is to change the rules. To enter the secret code. For databases, that means using SAND’s Infinite Optimization so every query performs for every user every time, from the moment the data is loaded. That means using SAND’s GBCC to scale unlimited access for unlimited users. That means using SAND’s ultra-compact datastore to achieve up to 99% compression.

In recent tests, SAND performed 10x faster than the leading appliance. How’s that for getting the golden egg?

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