Data warehouse appliance maker Netezza this week issued a self-congratulatory note for doubling the performance of its gear through some software trickery.

In August, Netezza issued Release 4 of its Performance Server (NPS) system, providing customers with a major performance boost for sorting through database queries. How much of a boost? Well, a doubling - and all through software.

Now the plucky vendor is at it again, doubling the performance of its gear via something called the Compress Engine.

As Netezza explains it in one of the more convoluted press releases we've ever run across,

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.

As data is loaded, inserted or updated into the NPS appliance it is automatically compressed into a compiled format, column-by-column, with the original data replaced by the Compress Engine "instruction set" for decompilation. Then, as this data is read from the disk during query operations, the Compress Engine reads its instruction set and reassembles the original data as it streams from the disk, effectively doubling the streaming data rate.

Er, but don't get too excited just yet. The Compress Engine doesn't ship until May of next year. We can only imagine the marketing meeting that went on where it was decided that announcing the technology now was a good idea.

Netezza goes up against big boys such as Teradata, Oracle and IBM in the data warehouse market. And, as you can see, investors have proved a tad confused over the little company's approach. ®

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