Tangential comment - but that Netezza appliance was really cool. I was able to use one early in my career, circa 2008. It had a nice cli query interface similar to psql (maybe it spoke postgres protocol, I don't remember) - and was blazing fast. I ran totally rookie-mistake filled, unoptimized queries on tables w/ billions of rows and got results back in ~seconds. Of course, not so impressive now, but was really impressive 15 years ago!They had a really wild architecture with FPGAs that, if I remember correctly, sat in between the CPU/disk and was used to offload some of query execution.
It was wildly expensive + expensive to maintain, so the company ended up (unsuccessfully, I think) jumping to Hadoop. Crazy times :)
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