I have 2 comments:
First, about REDB stock... I love playing with the stock. In late December I bought in at 5.875 then sold at 8.25. Sounds good? Actually no, because I sold SAPHY at 107 to do the REDB and now its at 128. I could have almost matched the gain for none of the risk. Even so, I still think REDB will see 12 before year's end, but I wouldn't bet more than 10% of my portfolio here.
Second, about Red Brick Systems software. I work for a company which regularly builds data warehouses for marketing purposes, ranging in size from 80Gb to 4Tb. I have personally been in charge of 14 implementations over the last 4 years.
My company evaluated Red Brick about 2 years ago. I remember the following:
1) Great support - Red Brick PLANTED a very skilled developer on our site for SIX COMPLETE WEEKS, not on shared duty, totally devoted to us, and we hadn't committed to anything beyond the trial (though we obviously had a huge potential for their sales). When we considered DB2PE on an SP2 IBM would only pony up with 70 hours of consulting AT THEIR SITE (and that was after they had already lost 2 10MM+ hardware sales to our DEC-Oracle based implementations)
2) Cool SQL feature - Red Brick has implemented a true CASE structure in their SQL language.
3) Good performance in multi table joins, even when joining 14 tables together. This was important for us because Marketing frequently requires 12 months of data to even begin working on a decent model. In Oracle we have to avoid this by spending the time and space to pull all the desired months into a single record for each person or product.
Now the negative stuff:
1) None of our potential customers had ever heard of them (though now some of them are REQUESTING Red Brick bids)
2) Impossible to find experienced DBA's, or semi-experienced ones, or developers, or database designers.
3) Totally hit a wall at 600Gb (though now this may no longer be true)
4) Loader much slower than Oracle's (Again, may no longer be true)
5) Forced us to use the Star schema, which was counter to our experience and infrastructure. My company's competitive advantage is that we can build a single table (or a small set of tables) containing all columns necessary for Marketing selections using a proprietary tool we call "the flattener". Red Brick's technology would have allowed us to join many tables together to dynamically achieve the same goal, but the Marketing users couldn't seem to grasp the concept. And always remember: the users' ability to use the system is the only thing that really matters in a data warehouse.
6) Oracle caught up with the Red Brick technology, and Oracle scales well to 4Tb (and we assume beyond) when used on a Pyramid MPP.
There were other issues too, but it's 3:30am and I'm a little fuzzy.
Bottom line: 2 years ago was clearly not the right time for us to move to Red Brick, and today there is no technological reason to switch.
Ray |
