TechPulse 360

The database market is shifting its focus and new opportunities will open for vendors to challenge sales-leader Oracle, says Greenplum president and co-founder Scott Yara.

Larry Ellison unveils Oracle's data warehouse machine

In the next three to five years, analytical databases will supplant traditional transactional databases as the market staple, says Yara. That will give an advantage to products, like the one Greenplum makes, which target gargantuan data warehouses and mine mountains of business and scientific information for trends and patterns.

The change could give rise to a competitor large enough to give Oracle a run for its money, says Yara. “The market absolutely wants a challenger.”

For more than two decades, traditional databases have targeted the transactional market, recording and storing events, such as credit card purchases. This model has begun to change. Vendors have for several years added features to better analyze stored data, which as been accumulating in ever larger amounts.

At the same time, companies, such as Teradata, have grown up focused on the high-end of this market – the data warehouse.

Marketing moving to anlytical databases, says Scott Yara

Now, these large databases and data warehouses are becoming mainstream. Yara estimates that over the past 25 years, only 1,000 or so organizations required a data warehouse. In the past five to seven years, that has grown to 100,000 companies and, in the next five years, a million companies will need one, he says.

“The growth of the market is taking off right now,” he says. “In this new market, Oracle doesn’t have the best technology out of the box.”

In June, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard hoped to change this by jointly announcing a hardware-software appliance aimed at the data warehouse opportunity. Other competitions such as Netezza, DATAllegro, Infobright and Teradata are working on more cost effective products as well.
This fluidity could change the competitive landscape, says Yara. “The database market is charging away from transactions toward analytics.”