The sky did not fall in for Netezza as Oracle predicted. Instead, we've gone from strength to strength. TwinFin extends our lead and at our current run rate, TwinFin customers will soon outnumber Exadata’s. My sense is that Oracle has fewer than 25 Exadata installations although I suspect many of these are not paid-for customers in the strict "hand over the money" sense of the word. For a company with the inside track on over 250,000 customers, 25 installations in a year is hardly stellar success -- it's what a statistician may call a "rounding error." This is also low when you consider that in the same time period over twice this number of Oracle customers churned to Netezza, presumably pausing to consider Exadata on their way.

Oracle's challenge is greater than people imagine: their portability advantage is now their Achilles’ heal. Portability across different hardware systems -- Oracle's first killer app -- is a hindrance in the appliance model whose advantage lies in very specific software designed for a specific hardware configuration. For Oracle, generalization means that all the baggage that comes with an Oracle database for performance tuning and data management -- such as results caching, buffers, indexing, partitioning, tablespaces (ie the stuff you don’t need in Netezza) — is standard in Exadata. This increases costs, slows throughput and makes for the very same unwieldy solution people are trying to escape.

Oracle is responding to Netezza (and Teradata) in the same way that the incumbent database vendors responded to Oracle in the 1980s: they are bolting-on "me too" features to existing products and hoping their customers won't be tempted by alternative solutions. Cullinet's IDMS/R is a great example. It was their attempt to be seen to embrace the relational model by adding relational features to their CODASYL database. But history shows no one was convinced and it was too little too late. Another spanner jamming Oracle's works is that the value of thoroughbred appliances is so visible and easily realized, their "PL/SQL standardization" trump card is easily discredited: when the business suffers, there's not much to discuss!

So what does the coming year hold for Exadata? Well, a new hardware platform announcement sends Oracle back to the starting line. There's a switch in tone from 'the world’s fastest data warehouse that can do OLTP' (circa 2008) to 'the world’s fastest OLTP database that can do data warehousing." But regardless of anything else, a sure fire thing is Oracle will claim victory and performance leadership. The full-page ads are probably already commissioned.

Why does Oracle insist on dragging around an empty Exadata cabinet to all their tradeshows? How does this help people learn about Exadata? Perhaps it helps you size up the system to determine if it will fit in a data center or underscores the point that when Oracle say hardware they know what they are talking about? Or perhaps it sets a new benchmark for demo'ing vaporware? One can imagine the Oracle booth bunnies saying: "and it has a door which opens like this...and then closes like this!"

For the last few years, lil' old Netezza routinely bring real kit to tradeshows - stuff intended for grown ups looking to solve real problems. We know booth visitors don't want to load up terabytes of data or break performance barriers with complex SQL, but for Netezza this is a case of putting our money where our mouth is. We don't talk about simplicity: we just show it. If we can set up a full blown 50TB machine in a couple of hours in a hostile environment like a tradeshow then think how this very visible simplicity benefit translates to time to value and cost reduction at your site?

Conversely, what does it say about a great big huge enormous vendor with infinite resources like Oracle that cannot set up their own live machine? Or even take one to a customer’s site. Perhaps it says that Oracle is a software company who in truth, know nothing about hardware? Perhaps it says that without an army of trained specialists working behind the scenes, this stuff just doesn't work so well? Or maybe Oracle has lost their innovative edge to such an extent that they truly believe opening and closing a cabinet door really is on the cusp?

In reality, embracing hardware - as Oracle is doing with Exadata - is a huge departure for them and don't underestimate the extent for them to screw this up. I can tell you anecdotally that the notion of "HARDWARE VENDORS ARE SCUM" was so ingrained in me at Oracle, that this was my only objection to joining Netezza several years after I left Oracle. I'm sure if you look closely at the Exadata box on the Oracle booth, it displays a sign that says: now wash your hands!

Meanwhile the little sign on the side of the Netezza cabinet just says: ours is real.