Wednesday, October 29. 2008

Netezza Appliance "Visited"

We've written before on the Netezza data warehouse appliance that supports the OGC simple feature specifications and hopes to offer clients exceedingly fast performance with high volumes of data (think terabytes). So,  on the exhibit floor of the GEOINT Symposium I got an up-close look at the basic device. If you've taken apart a deskside computer you'd recognize that it has the same basic components: a hard drive, processor and memory. What would be new is the "secret sauce," a silicon chip with the embedded proprietary logic to strip out certain extraneous bytes such as SQL statements and simply use the location-based data. This firmware approach to dealing with the complexities of massive amounts of data is amplied when these simple sleaves of hardware are rack mounted - 120 fold. The Netezza appliance is composed of 120 such devices described above in the company's Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing architecture. According to their literature on Netezza Spatial "each intelligent node...is an independent computer optimized specifically to accelerate analytic query performance on large data volumes."

The argument about whether you replace an Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE may be a question for some but it may not be an either/or situation. Netezza will first process the data using the ETL functions of Safe's FME which loads the spatial data into its firmware so it can bypass a typical database but many users have found an approach that works in tandem.

Posted by Joe Francica in Databases, Location Intelligence at 06:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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