At its annual European User Forum, Netezza Corporation unveiled its Compress Engine functionality which will double the speed of its high-performance data warehouse appliance while reducing the data footprint by up to four times. In some cases, customers will realize even greater compression ratios.

The Compress Engine, which was announced last December and released on a limited basis, will be available for full distribution this May as part of Release 4.5 of the Netezza appliance.

Among the customers already signed up to use the Netezza Compress Engine software are NYSE Euronext and The Nielsen Company – members of a growing class of businesses faced with rising data volumes and urgent analytic needs. NYSE Euronext, which operates the world's leading and most liquid exchange group, offers the most diverse array of financial products and services. NYSE Euronext implemented the Compress Engine for high-performance analysis on more than 200 terabytes of data.

"We have already realized a significant increase in capacity with Netezza’s Compress Engine feature. We more than doubled our existing database capacity by simply upgrading the software on the appliance,” said Steve Hirsch, chief data officer, NYSE Euronext.

“With this latest release of the Netezza appliance, we expect to double both query performance and data load speeds, above and beyond the high performance the system already delivers,” Hirsch continued. “These performance gains are key for us as they enable the platform to keep pace with our ever increasing data volumes without increasing footprint. Additionally, the improvements allow us to better serve our user community, enabling faster analytics across deeper datasets.”

Not Your Father’s Compression
Unlike traditional compression approaches used by several of the competitive data warehousing vendors, Netezza’s Compress Engine is designed primarily for performance improvement, and not merely to reduce data sizes and system footprints. While other compute-intensive approaches sacrifice performance for the sake of compression, Netezza Compress Engine delivers a significant boost in performance.

Netezza’s unique approach employs a patent-pending method for compiling columnar data in all tables of the database, allowing the Netezza appliance to compress the data to use disk much more effectively, greatly increasing query performance as data streams from the disk.

According to Philip Howard, director of Research – Technology at Bloor Research, “While there are lots of companies doing compression, there is an overhead involved in de-compressing the data, so you get a performance hit for tables below a certain size; above that you get a performance benefit. This means that there is an administrative overhead involved in determining which tables to compress. However, Netezza, true to its appliance principles, has implemented compression in such a way that this performance overhead is eliminated so that you get performance benefits with no administrative overhead.”

Compress Engine is part of the Netezza’s FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology (FAST) Engines framework, the foundation of its patented streaming architecture.

Features of the Compress Engine include:

• Doubling system performance
• Delivering up to 4x storage capacity
• Software-only upgrade
• No tuning or administration required
• System-wide data compression
• Decompression at streaming speeds

Release 4.5 of the Netezza system will be available in May 2008.


For more information about Netezza’s FAST Engine’s framework and Compress Engine