hopefully vertica works out better

than arrowpoint or that acopia product. I remember F5 trying to push that onto me after they acquired it, at one point they were pushing to get just *one* customer (I have several friends internal to F5, had more at the time than I do now some have left). It just doesn't (and still doesn't) make sense for F5 to have such a product. But they had(probably still have) plenty of cash to throw around.

vertica is a pretty amazing product, I am by no means an analytics guy, I was introduced to Vertica about a year ago in combination with Tableau software and left my jaw on the floor at the end of the presentation, not many products do that for me anyways. The sheer performance is just amazing.

One of my friends is a sales rep at Vertica and he tells me time and time again the product more or less sells itself (also a rarity in almost any IT market in my experience), the performance gains (even before optimizing the vertica cluster) are just unbelievable until you see it first hand. And they make it easy to try (unlike much of their direct competition) by making it downloadable and supportable on physical hardware, virtual hardware, and even within Amazon EC2 (ugh, but nice that they give customers the option).

Tableau on it's own is an amazing product, but it's true power can't be seen without something like vertica behind it, with something like MySQL you'll be waiting...and waiting...for queries to return. One developer I worked with last year was too impatient for me to get round to setting up a vertica cluster and he pointed Tableau at an existing MySQL reporting host, he gave up on it after waiting 15 minutes for the first query to return from MySQL.