Data warehousing vendor ParAccel is putting an emphasis on high-performance
analytics in the upcoming version of its database appliance.
According to the company, when it releases ParAccel Database Version 2.5 in
the second quarter of 2010, it will be armed with a number of enhancements
designed to improve
performance. For starters, ParAccel's advanced query optimizer, Omne, has
been enhanced to "allow automatic decorrelation of ... broader ranges of
embedded subqueries to further simplify and accelerate the development of
analytic applications," ParAccel said Feb. 21.
"First it eliminates some barriers that as you're developing analytic
apps you always have to be cognizant of, barriers essentially around query
complexity," explained Rick Glick, ParAccel vice president of Technology
and Architecture. "For example, we can handle skip level decorrelation
query patterns, which is I believe unique to us. Secondly, by avoiding bad
plans and always having consistently great performance we dramatically reduce
the amount of physical design work and modeling that an analytic app developer
goes through."
ParAccel also has focused on taking advantage of solid-state storage for the
release, and is "partnering with Fusion-io ... to run PADB 2.5 on servers
utilizing Fusion-io drives," the company said. "The combination of
Fusion-io flash technology and PADB's advanced analytic processing
architecture allows customers to do far more with fewer servers."
"One Flash card offers the same scan performance as a bunch of drives,
and you can put multiple Flash drives in these [appliances]," Glick said.
Other performance boosts come under the hood, such as the appliance's
handling of metadata in column block headers.
"If information in the block headers tells us that the values we are
looking for can't be in that data block we never read the block from disk,"
Glick said. "On highly restrictive scan operations this yields a dramatic
performance improvement."
In addition, the company has added column-level encryption to support
compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Barry Zane, CTO
and founder of ParAccel, said in statement that the upcoming release builds on
the database's "massively parallel, columnar design" to "shatter
conventional limits on analytic complexity ... The result is greater decision
confidence and powerful leaps forward in ability to execute for companies across
a wide range of industries."
Database News & Reviews 
