Performance enhancements are a given in any database or data warehouse appliance upgrade these days. The real competition has shifted to support for analytic functions and applications handled inside the database.

Netezza, Aster Data Systems and Infobright announced their latest salvoes in what's shaping up to be an analytics arms race. Netezza announced new i-Class analytics functionality due in August that will enable companies using its TwinFin data warehousing platform to program in-database analytics in various languages and approaches including Java, C, C++, Python and Hadoop MapReduce.

In-database processing speeds analysis because it eliminates the step of moving data out of and results back into the warehouse. Support for non-SQL programming lets developers stick with the languages and approaches they are used to.

The i-Class functionality will also support matrix-manipulation approaches, such as those supported by SAS, IBM SPSS and the R programming language. The support will be provided through integrated Eclipse IDE plug-ins, the R graphical user interface, and a library with 40 starter-kit functions with advanced techniques scalable in TwinFin's massively parallel processing environment.

"We've done a lot of work to abstract the fact that the programmer or analyst using these functions is running on a data warehouse," said Phil Francisco, vice president of product marketing and product management at Netezza.