Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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ParAccel: What is New and Different?

As I was preparing for a briefing with Kim Stanick, VP of Marketing, I kept wondering what was different about ParAccel. Started in 2005, this new start-up makes some bold claims about speed, scalability and simplicity. I am not against being bold. But where is the meat?

Their DBMS engine uses compressed in-memory columnar processing with a shared-nothing massively parallel processing. Column-oriented goes back several decades. Compression is not new. In-memory databases also go back several decades. And, MPP is becoming common. So, what is new and different? It might lie in their strategy.

ParAccel is targeting the medium-sized companies (and above) who are maturing their BI system and experience pain with performance and scalability. The sweet point is between a half terabyte to ten terabytes of data. Avoiding a rip-and-replace strategy, their approach is to augment the existing system through an Amigo arrangement. Based on analytical complexity, incoming queries are routed to the database-of-record or to the ParAccel database. ParAccel is also offering their DBMS as an appliance through reseller arrangements with major hardware vendors.

ParAccel is a company to watch. I am still searching for an answer to my question, which should emerge over the coming months as they roll out their product and secure satisfied customers.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Thursday, 23 August 2007 | Permalink