GigaOm Radar for Data Warehousesv3.0

1. Summary

Data warehouses are a powerful and established component of the enterprise technology landscape and a go-to solution for organizations seeking to manage data at scale. The foundational data warehouse technologies have transformed and been refined over the years, first with optimizations such as massively parallel processing (MPP), in-memory processing, vector processing, and columnar storage. Later, the major breakthrough of cloud data warehousing brought forth additional capabilities such as autoscaling and elasticity, multicluster concurrency, and freedom from data warehouse physical appliance hardware, resolving some of the most important challenges data warehouse solutions were facing up to that point.

Today, data warehouse vendors are developing and including more sophisticated native and integrated capabilities to refine their solutions, including machine learning (ML), business intelligence (BI) and analytics functions, extended data governance and security, and other technologies. Additionally, in the broader technology landscape, there is an emerging rivalry between data warehouses and data lake solutions, which is rooted in the overall goal of developing a solution that will act as a definitive single source of truth for data analytics. Different vendors espouse different viewpoints on this issue, but the overall trend has been toward convergence of the two approaches, as even the partisans on each side are adding features that make their solutions better able to take on the workloads of the other.

This consolidation trend is likely to continue; however, what ultimately matters most is the use cases the solutions are designed to support. Determining their organization’s specific needs will help customers critically evaluate the criteria that are likely to matter most to their specific requirements. To that end, this Radar report is designed to help customers become familiar with the offerings in the current landscape.

The vendors reviewed in this Radar report encompass data warehouse specialist vendors and cloud providers, incumbent enterprise vendors, and data platform vendors.

• Specialist vendors are pure-play vendors focused on refining the built-in capabilities of their solutions to encompass an ever-wider array of features. For capabilities not built in, they have also focused on pursuing dedicated partnerships with third parties to ensure their solution can integrate with a wide ecosystem of tools.
• Cloud providers, incumbent enterprise vendors, and data platform vendors offer a wide array of capabilities. These vendors offer well-rounded, robust solutions, which often are integrated tightly with that particular vendor’s full stack of products, lending their offerings extended capabilities from the same vendor. For customers already possessing infrastructure or products from the same vendor, this can be a distinct advantage.

While the data warehouse category is full of powerful, capable, and incredibly refined solutions, and choosing one may seem difficult, readers should be encouraged because this means numerous solutions would likely accommodate a majority of the requirements they have, and it’s just a matter of selecting what is ultimately the best fit.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key data warehouse vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Data Warehouse Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.