Which columnar store do you use?

Some HP Vertica and some Actian Vectorwise. Vertica scales to multiple nodes better and HP is a much more accepted vendor. I've got friends who are doing a lot of Redshift (which is repackaged ParAccel). Start with Redshift if you are new to columnar.

If you can afford it, Microsoft's new PDW looks like a much richer functionality columnar store.

that could reflect software licensing and PSO. Oracle's $100k/TB is just the cost of the hardware before software.

Whoever told you that about Teradata was very bad at arithmetic.

The mighty Curt Monash reads HackerNews? Who knew?

Howdy. I like how you hold no punches on your blog but normally you are good about backing them up with data. I hope to meet you some day.

The precise quote from my client that uses TeraData is "I.T. charges me $1M for each TB I use". I know that's very different from what it costs the business but it is still a very damning number. That's basically a fully loaded cost to an end business unit.

OK, maybe it's his IT department that's arithmetically challenged. :)

If costs are CLOSE to being that high, then data volumes are a very poor metric for cost allocation. 2+ people per terabyte are being counted in, so either there are a huge number of tables, or they're including BI developers, or something.

E.g., doubling the size of every table, if nothing else changed, might only take those costs up 10%, give or take a factor of 2.