Article updated: 20 May, 2021
“Sunsetting” is a term unique to the tech world. It conjures feelings of tranquility. But when a software vendor phases out a product, it is a budgeting and planning headache. And if a team can’t keep up, it means running without support or security updates. This is now the fate of Netezza customers.
IBM was clear when they acquired Softlayer in 2013 that the future was cloud, not an on-premises appliance like Netezza, which it had acquired three years previously. So, it was in 2018 that IBM announced the end of support for PureData System for Analytics, their name for Netezza.
IBM’s suggested migration path is to move to IBM Integrated Analytics System (IIAS), which runs on DB2. IIAS offers some backward compatibility, such as reading Netezza SQL through a compatibility mode. However, there is no guarantee that code will work as intended and the compatibility mode is only a stop-gap solution. Customers will need to change their code sooner or later.
This migration requires rigorous planning and testing to ensure that business critical code works as intended. If IBM cannot guarantee 100 percent compatibility, then you’ll need to test every function and every query after migration.
If you are going to do all this work anyway, the sunsetting of Netezza is an opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate your solution and consider other options. For analytics, BI, or data warehousing, you should have Exasol on your list. Exasol is the world’s fastest analytics database. But more importantly for Netezza customers, Exasol offers complete choice. If you love the appliance model, we offer that. Unlike Netezza, Exasol runs on commodity hardware. You can even run our community edition on your laptop.
But if this is an opportunity for you to also move to cloud, we do that too for both private and public clouds (SaaS). Run Exasol on your choice of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Manage it yourself or have us do it for you. You can even run Exasol in the cloud and access data on-premises (or vice-versa) for a hybrid solution.
The best news of all for sunset-weary customers is Exasol’s open standards which ensure future flexibility and avoids lock-in. With our User Defined Functions, you can write in the language of your choice and run that code directly in our database for ultimate performance.
Migration is a lot of work that nobody looks forward to. The silver lining is that the Netezza sunset is an opportunity to move to a modern data warehouse solution like Exasol for better performance and scalability, reduced maintenance, and cost savings from commodity hardware. It will be worth the effort, and your enterprise will be ready for the future.
To find out more about migrating from Netezza please read our tech blog and our white paper “What Next After Netezza”.