Chris Mellor at The Register posted an interesting article a couple of days ago, entitled HP and Violin build Oracle Exadata killer. The slidedeck has been removed from HP’s FTP site, but a bit of Google magic throws up a couple of mirror copies.

It’s an entertaining read (“Do a Proof of Concept! 94% win rate!! We can and do win against Exadata!!”), and a nice illustration of the FUD techniques that companies use in marketing their products against others. Greg Rahn has taken Netezza to task in the past for this, and to be fair at least Netezza had a serious white paper to back up their arguments. HP’s deck (including choice sections such as “How to sell against Exadata”) is IMHO nothing more than a biased set of arguments for salespeople to use to attempt to bullshit customers.