Podcast: Spatially Enabled Data Warehouse Appliances

By Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg
September 23, 2008

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This week two different vendors, Netezza and Teradata, announced spatial extensions for their data warehouse appliances. Our editors explain the new offerings and explore what the questions these solutions prompt for geospatial practitioners as well as traditional database administrators. Is one of these solutions in your future?

Show notes:

Netezza Enters Location Intelligence Market With Spatial Extension To Data Warehouse Appliance (press release)
Another Appliance with Geospatial Support (All Points Blog on Teradata anouncement)
Netezza Spatial
Teradata
GeoThought Blog (Peter Batty, a consultant to Netezza, blogs about its new product in several posts)
Data warehouse appliance (Wikipedia, includes cost of ownership values)

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Data Warehouse Options (#1) by Carl Brenner, Merkle
Date: September 29, 2008 17:32 PM

I am familiar with Netezza and Teradata. Both are designed to handle unbelievably large datasets. They are built to scale - that is handle large incremental chunks of data - to provide actionable speed. Scalability refers to the ability to add resources to maintain necessary speed to make the system useful.

Pure GIS doesn't handle advanced database architectures very well. For example, they are horrible for slowly changing dimensions, which is a critical part of data warehouses.

This is why Oracle, SQL Server, Netezza, Teradata, etc. are important to use with your GIS. Use the right tool for the right job - let the pure databases handle the architecture and push the summaries to your GIS system.

SQL Server 2008 is really built for Microsoft to push its Virtual Earth and to make that application easier for programmers. Of course, we can do analysis with it too!

From a DBA point of view, spatial data really just introduces new data types with particular ways to join tables. They're good at keeping the database happy - not to add new value to it.

Its not surprising that Oracle users don't use spatial all that much - you really need the right task to attack with it.

Very interesting topic - I was thinking of these topics, for different reasons, this week too!

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