Down The Yellowbrick Database Road - A High Performance MPP database

Yellowbrick continues to develop as a very fast MPP database for demanding analytic workloads. It has Postgres compatibility, which is useful for interacting with various existing tools. However, the core of the product including the optimizer has been developed from scratch, and benchmarks show it to be very efficient. What is more important is that its customers appear unusually satisfied with the product, repeatedly commenting on the high performance, predictable pricing and excellent customer service.

Yellowbrick started as an appliance, but has now made the transition to a full cloud-based product running on either private clouds or AWS, with Azure to follow. It competes with Snowflake and other scalable databases such as Teradata, Vertica and Greenplum. Some customers have transitioned to Yellowbrick away from older products like Netezza, but Yellowbrick can also co-exist with other data warehouse tools. Some customer deployments use it for the highest demanding workloads while retaining previous data warehouses for less strenuous analytic use cases. Customers include large Telcos, insurance firms, hedge funds and other financial services companies.

Yellowbrick’s transition from appliance to cloud database should help it gain market momentum in 2023. Customers with very demanding analytic workloads should seriously consider it as an option, and carry out their own benchmarking on their own data against alternatives to compare performance, scalability and value.