Sybase sues database start-up in east Texas court

Sybase IQ has hundreds of users, including the Internal Revenue Service, which runs a 150TB data warehouse based on the Sybase technology to help it catch tax cheats. License revenue for Sybase IQ grew more than 50% year-over-year in the second quarter, Sybase CEO John Chen said during a conference call last month.

But vertical databases only started attracting widespread notice several years ago as super-large data warehouses began to emerge, such as a 2-petabyte data warehouse that Yahoo uses to analyze online advertising data. Yahoo's mostly custom-built system is based on the PostgreSQL open-source database.

Besides Vertica, other start-ups that are focusing on ultra-large, ultra-fast business intelligence technologies include companies such as ParAccel, InfoBright and Exasol, among others. However, Vertica has had the highest profile by virtue of the fact that it has obtained the most venture capital backing -- $23.5 million -- and that it has the best-known founder: relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker.

Stonebraker, who played a lead role in creating PostgreSQL as well as the Ingres database, has openly dismissed his past inventions and other relational technologies. In a blog post last fall, Stonebraker declared that column-based databases made their relational counterparts "long in the tooth" and said that relational software "should be considered legacy technology." Andrew Ellicott, senior marketing director at Vertica, said Monday that officials at the company don't think Sybase's suit has any merit. "There is a lot of prior art out there," Ellicott said, adding that Vertica's technology comes from an MIT research project called C-Store that Stonebraker and the company's other technical founders were involved in.

Ellicott declined to comment on Sybase's choice of venue for the lawsuit. He said the two vendors have exchanged documents via their lawyers but haven't done any negotiating in advance of the first hearing in the case, which is scheduled for November 2009.

Last month, Mozilla, developer of the Firefox Web browser, said it is deploying Vertica's software for an internal data warehouse. Other customers that Vertica has signed on since the lawsuit was filed include Comcast Communications, Vonage and Level 3 Communications, according to Ellicott. He said the company has 50 paying customers total.

The suit by normally mild-mannered Sybase could be related to a battle earlier this year against a Wall Street hedge fund that had been pressuring the software vendor to boost its sales and stock price -- or split itself up. Sybase negotiated a truce with the hedge fund, Sandell Asset Management, in mid-February. The company's stock price has risen to higher levels in the past month than it had been for at least a decade, peaking at US$36.99 on Aug. 14.