Vectorwise for Workgroups High Performance Analytics for Workgroups and Mid-Market Organizations

Vectorwise for Workgroups High performance analytics for workgroups and mid-market organizations

Table of Contents

Introduction – Start tackling Big Data today 2

What is Big Data? 3

Business case 4

Benefits 5

Vectorwise use cases 6 Financial services ...... 6 Social media ...... 6 E-commerce ...... 7 Retail ...... 7 Transportation and distribution ...... 7 Clinical research ...... 7

Conclusion 9

Introduction – Start tackling Big Data today

High performance analytics on Big Data has long been considered the domain of select departments within the Enterprise. Mid-market organizations and workgroups inside large organizations have been unable to access high performance analytics due to budget constraints and lack of expertise – until now.

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is the most affordable way to power high performance analytics and start tackling Big Data challenges. Vectorwise is the record-breaking relational database technology that unlocks the power of commodity hardware through software innovation to deliver1:

› The fastest database performance so you can run queries quicker.

› Best price/performance so you can spend less on hardware to get started, and less on ongoing tuning and maintenance to keep the system run fast.

› Most energy-efficient database that requires fewer servers to deliver fast performance.

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition helps mid-market organizations and workgroups solve performance issues so they can start tackling the challenges of Big Data without the million dollar price tag. Save on every aspect of your Big Data implementation including hardware, software, and spend less time on complex database tuning to speed up results. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition puts your organization in the position to start tapping into the power of Big Data.

Operating System Source data size Database users Server cores Price

Windows 7, 100 GB 10 4 USD 4,995 Windows 2008

1 See http://www.tpc.org/tpch

What is Big Data?

Big Data presents businesses with many opportunities and challenges. In addition to storage challenges, Gartner2 defines Big Data challenges by looking at three related aspects of data:

› Volume: data size. › Variety: both structured and unstructured (or semi-structured) data. › Velocity: speed at which data arrives and must be processed.

Mid-market organizations and workgroups might not have the same data volumes as Google or Facebook, however Big Data challenges are frequently encountered including poor query performance making ad-hoc reports and dashboards unusable (velocity), which is caused from more data than their existing hardware can handle (volume), which also limits what data they can analyze (variety).

2 Beyer, Mark. "Gartner Says Solving 'Big Data' Challenge Involves More Than Just Managing Volumes of Data".

Business case

High performance Big Data analytics are traditionally available to small elite groups at large and rich organizations. Medium-size businesses and even departments in larger organizations have been starved for access to high-performance analytics due to lack of budget and expertise.

A mid-market organization or workgroup often starts a Business Intelligence (BI) implementation as a necessity: analyses against the operational database become too intrusive or complicated and a separate database is created for the BI implementation. Nobody really has the expertise or time to carefully design the database and readily available resources are used for the implementation: a tech-savvy individual frees up some time and uses commodity hardware and existing software licenses, possibly supplemented with open source (―free‖) software, to do an implementation. Initial results are promising: performance is good and capabilities are great compared to direct access to the operational database. The creator of the BI implementation is a hero.

The BI implementation becomes a success: more and more users demand access to the environment, queries become more complex, and more and more data is added to the database. The implementation starts faltering and it becomes a victim of its own success. Performance slows down, users get frustrated, and the creator of the BI implementation looses his/her hero status.

Options are limited. Try a multi-dimensional database as an alternative but suddenly users must change the interface they use, data integration becomes problematic, and yet another technology is introduced that requires special expertise you don’t have access to.

You think you have no way out, because of budget constraints and lack of expertise. The BI implementation is doomed to fail.

Think again.

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is available for less than $10k per installation. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition can process data 10x to 1,000x faster than other relational database technologies on equivalent commodity hardware so that you can achieve more results using far fewer resources, without the need for special expertise.

Benefits

10x – 1,000x faster performance enables better Business Intelligence for more users at a lower cost.

› Faster results: queries that took hours or minutes now take minutes or seconds.

› Faster project delivery: simply load data and start running queries instead of spending time and resources to carefully design, optimize and tune the database.

› Lower costs to purchase the hardware and to design, manage and maintain the system.

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition supports industry standard ANSI SQL and connectivity over JDBC, ODBC and .Net. Most commonly used BI tools including Tableau, Yellowfin, MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Cognos and others are certified with Vectorwise.

Standard support for Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is delivered by Actian taking advantage of around-the-world resources to deliver support for your local needs.

Use of Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is restricted:

› Up to 100 GB of source database data

› Up to 10 database users

› Up to 4 cores

There is an easy migration from Vectorwise Workgroup Edition to Enterprise Edition should your requirements exceed the restrictions, today or in the future.

Vectorwise use cases

Following are examples of Vectorwise Enterprise Edition use cases across various industries. Similar use cases with Vectorwise Workgroup Edition may apply to your organization.

Financial services A number of organizations in financial services chose Vectorwise. The Rohatyn Group, a Wall Street-based hedge fund focusing on emerging technologies, replaced a home-grown, in-memory database with Vectorwise in order to continue to deliver at least as good in- memory-like performance while not being limited to the total amount of memory. The analysts using the system had expressed a desire to query historical data as well as current positions and the data volume was simply too large to store cost-effectively in memory. Vectorwise provides the in-memory performance, but now hundreds of millions of rows containing historical data are stored on-disk.

―For the past 20 years, I’ve been searching for the killer database that would fulfill most of our intense data processing needs and with the discovery of Vectorwise, that search is now over - this database is in a class of its own. Right out of the box, Vectorwise lets us effortlessly plow through millions and millions of rows of data with infinite width and depth and without the need for new expensive hardware, complicated schemas, explicit indexing, pre-aggregation, or specifically hand-crafted DBA-tuned SQL. The Ingres and Vectorwise leaders and technologists have performed a miracle here.‖ — Warren Master, CTO, The Rohatyn Group

Social media Many social media websites are extremely popular and generate vast amounts of data about their users. NK (http://nk.pl) is a large social media site in Poland, twice as large as Facebook in Poland.

Social media companies often use advertizing to monetize user behavior. However, user behavior changes and changes in behavior warrant action. Prior to using Vectorwise, the Product Managers at NK would have to wait days or weeks for their queries against the vast amounts of data to complete. Vectorwise enables fast insights on Big Data enabling quick actions.

―We looked to solutions from other vendors with analytic databases, but selected Vectorwise for its superior performance and cost-effective model.‖ — Edward Mezyk, Senior Project Coordinator in NK Research and Data-warehouse Division

E-commerce Data is core to business for e-commerce organizations. GSI Commerce, an eBay Inc. company, enables its customers to perform infomercial analysis. GSI Commerce ran into the limits of its existing database technology and decided to evaluate Vectorwise.

―Vectorwise now underpins our reporting platform so our clients benefit not just from blazing fast performance but access to five years of transactional history – something we were unable to do adequately before with our original RDBMS.‖ — Kevin Struckhoff, Senior IT Manager for GSI Commerce

Retail Customer focus is central to US-based convenience store chain Sheetz. Sheetz performs data analysis to optimize the experience for customers on the go whilst saving costs at the same time. Vectorwise enables Sheetz to double its access to historical data and be ready for the expected growth over the next few years.

―Data growth is occurring at record rates. Based on our experience so far, we are impressed with the results of Vectorwise...‖ — Jarrid Magalich, Technical Services Manager at Sheetz Transportation and distribution Timocom is the leader in European freight exchange. On a daily basis Timocom brings some 85,000 users and 300,000 international cargo space and freight offers together on its web portal. One of the challenges for freight carriers is fraud and theft. Timocom selected Vectorwise to help monitor for criminal activity and analyze user behavior.

―Our database in its existing form had reached its limits. Generally, we have already seen up to hundredfold of the inquiry speed in our initial tests without having done any optimization of the tables or inquiries.‖ — Ingo Klose, Manager Business Intelligence at TimoCom Clinical research CTSU (the MRC/Cancer Research UK/BHF Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit of Oxford University) primarily studies the causes and treatment of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart attack or stroke (which, collectively, account for most adult deaths worldwide). Vast data volumes are analyzed to look for a needle in a haystack. CTSU selected Vectorwise to perform analyses of these massive data sets in minutes rather than hours or weeks.

―Without Vectorwise, we simply would not be able to process this information, without having to wait days or weeks for each output.‖ — Alan Young, Director of Information Science, CTSU

Conclusion

Vectorwise Workgroup Edition is the most affordable way to power high performance analytics and start tackling Big Data challenges. Vectorwise Workgroup Edition helps mid- market organizations and workgroups solve performance issues so they can start tackling the challenges of Big Data without the million dollar price tag.

Operating System Source data size Database users Server cores Price

Windows 7, 100 GB 10 4 USD 4,995 Windows 2008

For more information and to download an evaluation version, go to http://www.actian.com/vectorwise.

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