HP Oracle Database Machine Makes Waves in Data Warehousing Space

Not too long ago, Microsoft sought to shake up the data warehousing market with the purchase of DATAllegro. Not to be outdone, Oracle jumped into the fray at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. But instead of an acquisition, Oracle pulled the covers off a project three years in the making—the HP Oracle Database Machine.

With its pricing and query optimization, Oracle's latest data warehousing play is a direct challenge to Teradata, IBM and other players in the enterprise data warehousing market. After the product was officially announced during Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's OpenWorld keynote, analysts from Gartner and Forrester Research said the play is potentially game-changing.

"I think Teradata is probably sitting there right now a little upset," said Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg. "I think that the disruptive part of this is that Oracle has moved into the hardware business … the second thing that's disruptive about this is that they have pushed the processing down to the storage drive. It allows you to parallelize code, general code."

Teradata and Netezza in particular were singled out as vendors Oracle was challenging with the product. Oracle President Charles Phillips said in an interview with eWEEK he expected other vendors to be caught off-guard and to be pressured by customers to improve performance.

"With an appliance available from Oracle with all the rich features that come with Oracle, and a high-end interconnect … it's going to change their market," Phillips said.

Oracle's Charles Rozwat, executive vice president of product development, offered up similar thoughts during the interview.

"What Netezza has delivered is really a big storage box, with very little database processing capability," Rozwat said. "Teradata is kind of balanced in the other direction, where they have a significant amount of database processing but not really all that much storage. What we've tried to do is create a system that is very balanced as far as both database processing and storage."