MonetDB
Analysis of the MonetDB project and the technologies and companies it produces, including the open source MonetDB columnar analytic DBMS. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Open source database management systems
- Columnar database management systems
- VectorWise, a project spun out of the MonetDB research group
Greenplum is being open sourced
While I don’t find the Open Data Platform thing very significant, an associated piece of news seems cooler — Pivotal is open sourcing a bunch of software, with Greenplum as the crown jewel. Notes on that start:
- Greenplum has been an on-again/off-again low-cost player since before its acquisition by EMC, but open source is basically a commitment to having low license cost be permanently on.
- In most regards, “free like beer” is what’s important here, not “free like speech”. I doubt non-Pivotal employees are going to do much hacking on the long-closed Greenplum code base.
- That said, Greenplum forked PostgreSQL a long time ago, and the general PostgreSQL community might gain ideas from some of the work Greenplum has done.
- The only other bit of newly open-sourced stuff I find interesting is HAWQ. Redis was already open source, and I’ve never been persuaded to care about GemFire.
Greenplum, let us recall, is a pretty decent MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic RDBMS. Various aspects of it were oversold at various times, and I’ve never heard that they actually licked concurrency. But Greenplum has long had good SQL coverage and petabyte-scale deployments and a columnar option and some in-database analytics and so on; i.e., it’s legit. When somebody asks me about open source analytic RDBMS to consider, I expect Greenplum to consistently be on the short list.
Further, the low-cost alternatives for analytic RDBMS are adding up. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Citus Data, Data warehouse appliances, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, EMC, Greenplum, Hadoop, Infobright, MonetDB, Open source, Pricing | 6 Comments |
VectorWise, Ingres, and MonetDB
I talked with Peter Boncz and Marcin Zukowski of VectorWise last Wednesday, but didn’t get around to writing about VectorWise immediately. Since then, VectorWise and its partner Ingres have gotten considerable coverage, especially from an enthusiastic Daniel Abadi. Basic facts that you may already know include:
- VectorWise, the product, will be an open-source columnar analytic DBMS. (But that’s not quite true. Pending productization, it’s more accurate to call the VectorWise technology a row/column hybrid.)
- VectorWise is due to be introduced in 2010. (Peter Boncz said that to me more clearly than I’ve seen in other coverage.)
- VectorWise and Ingres have a deal in which Ingres will at least be the exclusive seller of the VectorWise technology, and hopefully will buy the whole company.
- Notwithstanding that it was once named something like “MonetDB,” VectorWise actually is not the same thing as MonetDB, another open source columnar analytic DBMS from the same research group.
- The MonetDB and VectorWise research groups consist in large part of academics in Holland, specifically at CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica). But Ingres has a research group working on the project too. (Right now there are about seven “highly experienced” people each on the VectorWise and Ingres sides, although at least the VectorWise folks aren’t all full-time. More are being added.)
- Ingres and VectorWise haven’t agreed exactly how VectorWise and Ingres Classic will play together in the Ingres product line. (All of the obvious possibilities are still on the table.)
- VectorWise is shared-everything, just as Ingres is. But plans — still tentative — are afoot to integrate VectorWise with MapReduce in Daniel Abadi’s HadoopDB project.