GigaOm Solution Profile: Yellowbrick Data Warehouse

An Exploration Based on Key Criteria for Evaluating Data Warehouses

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Key Criteria Analysis
  3. Evaluation Metrics Analysis
  4. Bottom Line
  5. About Andrew Brust

1. Summary

Yellowbrick’s data warehouse platform specializes in high-concurrency, real-time operation, complex queries, and the ability to handle all of these workloads, along with ad hoc and batch analytics jobs, simultaneously. The platform is designed for high performance, implemented through a combination of engineering innovations. These include a special focus on memory management, an optimized threading model, custom device drivers and hardware acceleration, as well as network- and storage-awareness.

Yellowbrick offers a uniquely hybrid cloud data warehouse platform that blends the best of classic enterprise data warehouse capabilities with a host of modern features found in today’s cloud data warehouse platforms. Yellowbrick’s clientele, correspondingly, consists of a mix of no-nonsense enterprise companies in the financial services, insurance and manufacturing sectors, as well as a cohort of newer, born-in-the-cloud online businesses. The company boasts unusually high customer retention and customer satisfaction rates.

At the lowest levels, the Yellowbrick platform, like many of its competitors, is based on massively parallel processing (MPP) and vector processing — but similarities end there. For example, unlike the multitude of data warehouse platforms based exclusively on columnar storage, Yellowbrick has both a column store and row store, and manages the two directly to alleviate any management burden on the customer to coordinate the two. Essentially, the customer can treat Yellowbrick as if it had only one store; the engine will take care of executing queries against the appropriate store and will ensure the two are always in sync.

How to Read this Report

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding consider reviewing the following reports:

Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.

GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.

Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.

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