I don’t know how Bruce Scott’s article showed up in my mailbox but I’m confused by it (happens a lot these days).
I agree with him that too much has been made about whether a system is a columnar system or a truly columnar system or a vertically partitioned row store and what really matters to a customer is TCO and price-performance in their own environment. Bruce says as much in his blog post
Let’s start talking about what customers really care about: price-performance and low cost of ownership. Customers want to do more with less. They want less initial cost and less ongoing cost.
Then, he goes on to say
On this last point, we have found that we always outperform our competitors in customer created benchmarks, especially when there are previously unforeseen queries. Due to customer confidentiality this can appear to be a hollow claim that we cannot always publicly back up with customer testimonials. Because of this, we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is in our “Faster or Free” offer. Check out our website for details here: http://www.paraccel.com/faster_or_free.php
So, I went and looked at that link. There, it says:
Our promise: The ParAccel Analytic Database™ will be faster than your current database management system or any that you are currently evaluating, or our software license is free (Maintenance is not included. Requires an executed evaluation agreement.)
To be consistent, should that not make the promise that the ParAccel offering would provide better price-performance and lower TCO than the current system or the one being evaluated? After all, that is what customers really care about.
I’m confused. More coffee!
Oh, there’s more! Check out this link http://www.paraccel.com/cash_for_clunkers.php
Talk about fine print:
* Trade-in value is equivalent to the first year free of a three year subscription contract based on an annual subscription rate of $15K/user terabyte of data. Servers are purchased separately.
Hype Cycles 