Crowd-sourced Reviews Compare Oracle, Vertica, and Others

Posted January 30, 2017 by Soniya Shah, Information Developer

This blog post was authored by Steve Sarsfield. 

Crowd-sourced reviews are becoming more and more important in our lives. When you’re thinking about going to a new job, you check out Glassdoor. If you’re heading out to dinner, you check out Yelp. When buying online, the reviews on Amazon are not only informative, but sometimes hilarious. Crowdsourced reviews are not always 100% accurate and reliable, but they give you some insight into how users rate a product or service. So why not with big data databases?

A recent online article in ComputerWorld did just that. It compares the user experience of the Vertica platform to Oracle Exadata. If you click through and sign up for IT Central Station, you can download a paper on how real users are using solutions like Vertica, Oracle Exadata, Teradata, Netezza and EMC Greenplum. You can see some of the warts of the solutions as well as the great things that people are doing with big data databases.

The articles go into great detail. For example, one DBA talks about the power of Vertica: “In other databases, information will return in hours or even days while in Vertica it will be finished in minutes or even seconds. This is the best feature it has.”

Then, in the same review, there are some things to consider when implementing:

“Since it’s different than a raw store database, you need to understand the architecture in order to get the most out of Vertica. This means that you will need to design you data model to suit the Vertica architecture…”

The article and paper takes an interesting user perspective in that online evaluations from IT Central Station were compared. Here these are only users who are giving their thoughts on the platforms.

Peer reviews may be anonymous, if the reviewer desires. Reviewers don’t get paid and can’t be influenced by names and institutions. Although analyst reports are valuable in choosing your short list of solutions, peer reviews are becoming increasingly important to technology buying decisions. It’s great to see that we have the technology and community to support these reviews.