OLTP
Analysis of database management systems designed with a focus on OTLP (OnLine Transaction Processing) uses.
Elastra – somewhat more sensible Amazon-based DBMS option
Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Elastra, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Amazon SimpleDB – when less is, supposedly, enough
I’ve posted several times about Amazon as an innovative, super-high-end user — doing transactional object caching with ObjectStore, building an inhouse less-than-DBMS called Dynamo, or just generally adopting a very DBMS2-like approach to data management. Now Amazon is bring the Dynamo idea to the public, via a SaaS offering called SimpleDB. (Hat tip to Tim Anderson.)
SimpleDB is obviously meant to be a data server for online applications. There are no joins, and queries don’t run over 5 seconds, so serious analytics are out of the question. Domains are limited to 10GB for now, so extreme media file serving also isn’t what’s intended; indeed, Amazon encourages one to use SimpleDB to store pointers to larger objects stored as files in Amazon S3.
On the other hand, if you think of SimpleDB as an OLTP DBMS, your head might explode. There’s no sense of transaction, no mechanisms to help with integrity, no way to do arithmetic, and indeed no assurance that writes will be immediately reflected in reads. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, NoSQL, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS), Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
Software AG – an Adablast from the Adapast
The two oldest major software products companies may well both be German – SAP and Software AG. They’re both a little older than CA (which, directly, or indirectly, has bought most of the other pioneers), Information Builders, or SAS, none of which – if I recall correctly – was founded before 1975-6.
In its current configuration, Software AG is based in Germany, publicly traded, and divided into two divisions:
- ETS (Enterprise Transaction Systems), perhaps better thought of as “Software AG Classic.” This is a 350 million Euros business, solidly profitable and still growing, albeit slowly.
- WebMethods, a SOA/integration division named after the biggest of the acquisitions it’s built from. This is a 100 million Euros business growing Very Fast.
The ETS folks briefed me last week. Highlights follow. I also posted about Software AG’s history over on Software Memories, which may provide some useful detail and context. Read more
| Categories: OLTP, Software AG | 3 Comments |
Amazon Dynamo — when primary key access is enough
Amazon has a very decentralized technical operation. But even the individual pieces have interestingly huge scale. Thus, various different things they’re doing are of interest.
They recently presented a research paper on a high-performance transactional system called Dynamo. (Hat tip to Dare Obasanjo.) A key point is the following:
There are many services on Amazon’s platform that only need primary-key access to a data store. For many services, such as those that provide best seller lists, shopping carts, customer preferences, session management, sales rank, and product catalog, the common pattern of using a relational database would lead to inefficiencies and limit scale and availability. Dynamo provides a simple primary-key only interface to meet the requirements of these applications.
Now, I don’t think too many organizations past Amazon are going to decide that they can’t afford the overhead of an RDBMS for such OLTP-like applications. But I do think it will become increasingly common to find other reasons to eschew traditional OLTP relational architectures. Maybe you’ll want the schema flexibility of XML. Or perhaps you’ll be happy with a fixed relational schema, but will want to optimize for analytic performance.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloud computing, Data models and architecture, Database diversity, NoSQL, OLTP, Theory and architecture | 1 Comment |
The key problem with dashboard functionality
I keep hinting – or saying outright 🙂 — that I think dashboards need to be revolutionized. It’s probably time to spell that point out a little further.
The key issue, in my opinion, it that dashboards need to be much more personalizable than they are now. This isn’t just me talking. I’ve raised the subject with a lot of users recently, and am getting close to 100% agreement with my viewpoint.
One part of the problem is personalizing what to see, how to visualize it, and how all that’s arranged on the screen. No one product yet fully combines best-of-breed ideas from mainstream BI, specialized visualization tools, and flexible personalized web portals. But that’s not my biggest concern, as I think the BI industry is on a pretty good path in those respects.
Rather, the real issue is that dashboards don’t adequately reflect personal opinions as to what is important. Indeed, that lack is often portrayed as virtue, because supposedly top management can dictate through a few simple metrics what a whole company of subordinates will think and think about. (Balanced scorecard theology is a particularly silly form of this.) But actually that lack is a serious impediment to dashboard success, or indeed to a general analytic/numerate enterprise culture overall.
“One version of the truth” can be a gross oversimplification. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, OLTP | 6 Comments |
Webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS Tuesday October 23 12 noon Eastern time
I’m doing another webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS next Tuesday, at 12 noon Eastern. It’s sponsored by EnterpriseDB, who also sponsored one six months ago on the same subject. Hopefully, this one will be a bit fresher. Sign up today! The expected turnout is humongous.
Technorati Tags: EnterpriseDB, OLTP, database management system
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
SAP takes back MaxDB from MySQL
Way back in January, 2006, I wrote that MaxDB was not getting merged into MySQL. Given that, it makes sense for SAP to take back control of the product. As The Reg reports, that’s exactly what’s happening.
The bigger question is — how’s MySQL’s SAP certification coming along? Whether or not MySQL gets SAP-certified and included in the SAP product catalog will be a huge indicator of whether it’s ready for OLTP prime time.
Anybody want to place bets on which midrange OLTP DBMS gets certified for SAP first, MySQL or EnterpriseDB? MySQL has a large head start, but if my clients at EnterpriseDB have their priorities straight, they might wind up lapping MySQL even so.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, SAP AG | 4 Comments |
The Netezza Developer Network
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is: Read more
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10
Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.
There also are some big performance boosts. Read more
Three bold assertions by Mike Stonebraker
In the first “meat” — i.e., other than housekeeping — post on the new Database Column blog, Mike Stonebraker makes three core claims:
1. Different DBMS should be used for different purposes. I am in violent agreement with that point, which is indeed a major theme of this blog.
2. Vertica’s software is 50X faster than anything non-columnar and 10X faster than anything columnar. Now, some of these stats surely come from the syndrome of comparing the future release of your product, as tuned by world’s greatest experts on it who also hope to get rich on their stock options in your company, vs. some well-established production release of your competitors’ products, tuned to an unknown level of excellence,* with the whole thing running test queries that you, in your impartial wisdom, deem representative of user needs. Or something like that … Read more