About Oxbow Research
I’m Joe Harris. Oxbow Research is my vehicle for independently publishing my research and analysis on data platform performance.
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About Me
I started working with data in the late ‘90s using Excel and VBA. I got hooked on the power of SQL when I discovered MS Access.
I got my hands on Netezza in 2004, after working with some very slow data warehouses, and discovered the power of database performance.
Since then, I’ve focused on data warehouse consulting, big data analytics, and performance engineering.
I spent the last 8+ years as a performance engineer at Databricks and Amazon Redshift: solving hard customer problems, finding performance bottlenecks, and building benchmarking infrastructure (especially for competitive comparisons).
What Oxbow Research publishes:
Platform evaluations backed by reproducible benchmarks
Analysis of Total Cost of Ownership and pricing structures
Insights on emerging trends, vendor strategies, and market dynamics
Historical deep-dives on database companies and data technologies
How I work:
All benchmarking runs with BenchBox, an open-source benchmarking toolkit I created for this purpose. Using BenchBox ensures transparency and reproducibility. Any results I publish are simple to verify (although not always cheap!) because you can easily run the identical benchmarks yourself.
Why this exists:
Vendor benchmarks are marketing. Analyst firms take money from the vendors they evaluate. I wanted benchmarks I could trust, so I built the infrastructure to produce them.
The business model:
Oxbow Research is reader-funded. Paid subscriptions support the work. I don’t accept payment from benchmarked vendors that could influence methodology, results, or coverage.
My biases:
I worked at Databricks and Redshift. That experience is my qualification and my conflict of interest. I’ve written about this in detail in my disclosures.
