ParAccel, a new company based in San Diego, this week released a database for midsize companies that combines a number of BI-oriented features at a low price point.

The company is targeting the middle of the midmarket, not smaller businesses, according to vice president of marketing Kim Stanick. "You have to have a certain amount of data before our product becomes compelling for you," she said.

The software does not provide radical new technology, but ParAccel is touting its database's columnar orientation and MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities. The company argues that columnar databases are more effective for BI applications because users can query just the desired columns of a given row, saving bandwidth.

"That itself is a nice product set, especially with the price point," Stanick said.

ParAccel is offering the database as a software package or incorporated into a hardware appliance. It can also be deployed as a "drop in" accelerator for existing SQL Server and Oracle databases. The company said the database is compatible with all major brands of hardware.

A number of licensing options are available. All-in-memory systems cost $1,000 per gigabyte, beginning at 100GB. Disk-based systems cost $40,000 per node plus $10,000 per terabyte, starting at five nodes. Subscriptions cost $5,000 a month and up.

ParAccel counts some notable names among its management team. One of Oracle's co-founders, Bruce Scott, is vice president of engineering.

The startup originally positioned its product as an accelerator for SQL Server, but in response to market interest widened its focus to include data warehousing and Oracle's platform. This week's announcement doubled as the official company launch for ParAccel, which joins an increasingly crowded market for data warehousing.

ParAccel also announced benchmarking figures for its database running on Sun Fire X4100 and Blade 6000 servers. According to the company, the combination set TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support) records for performance in the 1TB category. Sun and ParAccel are also partnering on a data warehousing product.