Watch out for VectorWise

In the last few years, there have been so many new analytical DBMS startups de-cloaking that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Just off the top of my head, I would put Aster Data, DATAllegro, Dataupia, Exasol, Greenplum, Infobright, Kickfire, ParAccel, Vertica, and XtremeData in that category. Once you add the new analytical DBMS products from established vendors (Oracle Exadata and HP Neoview) we’re at a dozen new analytical DBMS options to go along with older analytical DBMS products like Teradata (industry leader), Netezza, and Sybase IQ. Finally, with the free and open source HadoopDB, we now have (at least) sixteen analytical DBMS solutions to choose from.

Given the current overwhelming number of analytical DBMS solutions, I suspect that VectorWise’s sneak preview happening this week is not going to get the attention that it deserves. VectorWise isn’t making a splash with a flashy customer win (like Aster Data did with MySpace), or a TPC-H benchmark win (like Kickfire and ParAccel did), or an endorsement from a DBMS legend (like Vertica did). They’re not even going to market with their own solution; rather, they’re teaming up with Ingres for a combined solution (though the entire Ingres storage-layer and execution engine has been ripped out and replaced with VectorWise). But I’m telling you: VectorWise is a company to watch.

Here are the reasons why I like them:

1. They are a column-store. I strongly believe that column-stores are the right solution for the analytical DBMS market space. They can get great compression ratios with lightweight compression algorithms, and are highly I/O efficient. In my opinion, the only reason why there are companies on the above list that are not column-stores is that they wanted to accelerate time to market by extending previously existing DBMS code, and the most readily available DBMS code at the time was a row-store. Any DBMS built from scratch for the (relational, structured data) analytical DBMS market should be a column-store.
   
   
2. Column-stores are so I/O efficient that CPU and/or memory usually become bottlenecks very quickly. Most column-stores do very careful optimizations to eliminate these bottlenecks. But to me, VectorWise has gone the extra mile. The query operators are run via a set of query execution primitives written in low-level code that allow compilers to produce extremely efficient processing instructions. Vectors of 100-1000 values within a column get pipelined through a set of query operations on that column, with many values typically being processed in parallel by SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) capabilities of modern CPU chips. Most database systems are unable to take advantage of SIMD CPU capabilities --- the tuple-at-a-time (iterator) processing model of most database systems is just too hard for compilers to translate to SIMD instructions. VectorWise has gone to great lengths to make sure their code results in vectorized CPU processing. Their execution primitives are also written to allow CPUs to do efficient out-of-order instruction execution via loop-pipelining (although compilers are supposed to discover opportunities for loop-pipelining on their own, without carefully written code, this doesn’t happen in practice as often as it should). So with highly optimized CPU-efficient code, along with (1) operator pipelining to keep the active dataset in the cache and (2) column-oriented execution reducing the amount of data that must be shipped from memory to the CPU, VectorWise reduces the CPU and memory bottlenecks in a major way. The bottom line is that VectorWise is disk efficient AND memory efficient AND CPU efficient. This gets you the total performance package.
   
3. Their founders include Peter Boncz and Marcin Zukowski from CWI. I generally think highly of the DBMS research group at CWI, except for one of their papers which ... actually ... maybe it’s better if I don’t finish this sentence. I have spoken highly about them in previous posts on my blog (see here and here).
   
4. It looks likely that their solution will be released open source. I was unable to get a definite commitment from Boncz or Zukowski one way or another, but the general sense I got was that an open source release was likely. But please don’t quote me on that.
   
5. If the VectorWise/Ingres solution does get released open source, I believe they will be an excellent column-store storage engine for HadoopDB. I have already requested an academic preview edition of their software to play with.

In the interest of full disclosure, here are a few limitations of VectorWise

• It is not a shared-nothing, MPP DBMS. It runs on a single machine. This limits its scalability to low numbers of terabytes. However, VectorWise is targeting the same “mass market” that Kickfire is, where the vast majority of data warehouses are less than 10TB. Furthermore, as mentioned above, it is a great candidate to be turned into a shared-nothing, parallel DBMS via the HadoopDB technology, and I look forward to investigating this opportunity further.
  
• In my experience, having large amounts of low-level, CPU optimized code is hard to maintain over time, and might limit how nimble VectorWise can be to take advantage of new opportunities. Portability might also become a concern (in the sense that not all optimizations will work equally well on all CPUs). However, I would not put anything past such a high quality technical team.
  

Two final notes:

• I like their go-to-market strategy. Like Infobright and Kickfire they are after the low-priced, high volume analytical DBMS mass market. But the problem with the mass market is that you need a large global sales and support team to handle the many opportunities and customers. Startups that target the high-end have it much easier in that they can get through the early stages of the company with a few high-priced customers and don’t need to invest as much in sales and support. By getting into bed with Ingres, VectorWise gets to immediately take advantage of the global reach of Ingres, a key asset if they want to target the lower end of the market.
  
• CWI is also the creator of the open source MonetDB column-store. VectoreWise is a completely separate codeline, and makes several philosophical departures from MonetDB. According to VectorWise, MonetDB’s materialization of large amounts of intermediate data (e.g., from running operators to completion) makes it less scalable (more suited for in-memory data sets) than VectorWise. VectorWise has superior pipelined parallelism, and vectorized execution. I have not checked with the MonetDB group to see if they dispute these claims, but my knowledge from reading the MonetDB research papers is generally in line with these statements, and my understanding is that the MonetDB and VectorWise teams remain friendly.