OLTP
Analysis of database management systems designed with a focus on OTLP (OnLine Transaction Processing) uses.
Things I keep needing to say
Some subjects just keep coming up. And so I keep saying things like:
Most generalizations about “Big Data” are false. “Big Data” is a horrific catch-all term, with many different meanings.
Most generalizations about Hadoop are false. Reasons include:
- Hadoop is a collection of disparate things, most particularly data storage and application execution systems.
- The transition from Hadoop 1 to Hadoop 2 will be drastic.
- For key aspects of Hadoop — especially file format and execution engine — there are or will be widely varied options.
Hadoop won’t soon replace relational data warehouses, if indeed it ever does. SQL-on-Hadoop is still very immature. And you can’t replace data warehouses unless you have the power of SQL.
Note: SQL isn’t the only way to provide “the power of SQL”, but alternative approaches are just as immature.
Most generalizations about NoSQL are false. Different NoSQL products are … different. It’s not even accurate to say that all NoSQL systems lack SQL interfaces. (For example, SQL-on-Hadoop often includes SQL-on-HBase.)
Introduction to Deep Information Sciences and DeepDB
I talked Friday with Deep Information Sciences, makers of DeepDB. Much like TokuDB — albeit with different technical strategies — DeepDB is a single-server DBMS in the form of a MySQL engine, whose technology is concentrated around writing indexes quickly. That said:
- DeepDB’s indexes can help you with analytic queries; hence, DeepDB is marketed as supporting OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) and analytics in the same system.
- DeepDB is marketed as “designed for big data and the cloud”, with reference to “Volume, Velocity, and Variety”. What I could discern in support of that is mainly:
- DeepDB has been tested at up to 3 terabytes at customer sites and up to 1 billion rows internally.
- Like most other NewSQL and NoSQL DBMS, DeepDB is append-only, and hence could be said to “stream” data to disk.
- DeepDB’s indexes could at some point in the future be made to work well with non-tabular data.*
- The Deep guys have plans and designs for scale-out — transparent sharding and so on.
*For reasons that do not seem closely related to product reality, DeepDB is marketed as if it supports “unstructured” data today.
Other NewSQL DBMS seem “designed for big data and the cloud” to at least the same extent DeepDB is. However, if we’re interpreting “big data” to include multi-structured data support — well, only half or so of the NewSQL products and companies I know of share Deep’s interest in branching out. In particular:
- Akiban definitely does. (Note: Stay tuned for some next-steps company news about Akiban.)
- Tokutek has planted a small stake there too.
- Key-value-store-backed NuoDB and GenieDB probably leans that way. (And SanDisk evidently shut down Schooner’s RDBMS while keeping its key-value store.)
- VoltDB, Clustrix, ScaleDB and MemSQL seem more strictly tabular, except insofar as text search is a requirement for everybody. (Edit: Oops; I forgot about Clustrix’s approach to JSON support.)
Edit: MySQL has some sort of an optional NoSQL interface, and hence so presumably do MySQL-compatible TokuDB, GenieDB, Clustrix, and MemSQL.
Also, some of those products do not today have the transparent scale-out that Deep plans to offer in the future.
YCSB benchmark notes
Two different vendors recently tried to inflict benchmarks on me. Both were YCSBs, so I decided to look up what the YCSB (Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark) actually is. It turns out that the YCSB:
- Was developed by — you guessed it! — Yahoo.
- Is meant to simulate workloads that fetch web pages, including the writing portions of those workloads.
- Was developed with NoSQL data managers in mind.
- Bakes in one kind of sensitivity analysis — latency vs. throughput.
- Is implemented in extensible open source code.
That actually sounds pretty good, especially the extensibility part;* it’s likely that the YCSB can be useful in a variety of product selection scenarios. Still, as recent examples show, benchmark marketing is an annoying blight upon the database industry.
*With extensibility you can test your own workloads and do your own sensitivity analyses.
A YCSB overview page features links both to the code and to the original explanatory paper. The clearest explanation of the YCSB I found there was: Read more
| Categories: Aerospike, Benchmarks and POCs, NewSQL, NoSQL, NuoDB, OLTP, Yahoo | 19 Comments |
NewSQL thoughts
I plan to write about several NewSQL vendors soon, but first here’s an overview post. Like “NoSQL”, the term “NewSQL” has an identifiable, recent coiner — Matt Aslett in 2011 — yet a somewhat fluid meaning. Wikipedia suggests that NewSQL comprises three things:
- OLTP- (OnLine Transaction Processing)/short-request-oriented SQL DBMS that are newer than MySQL.
- Innovative MySQL engines.
- Transparent sharding systems that can be used with, for example, MySQL.
I think that’s a pretty good working definition, and will likely remain one unless or until:
- SQL-oriented and NoSQL-oriented systems blur indistinguishably.
- MySQL (or PostgreSQL) laps the field with innovative features.
To date, NewSQL adoption has been limited.
- NewSQL vendors I’ve written about in the past include Akiban, Tokutek, CodeFutures (dbShards), Clustrix, Schooner (Membrain), VoltDB, ScaleBase, and ScaleDB, with GenieDB and NuoDB coming soon.
- But I’m dubious whether, even taken together, all those vendors have as many customers or production references as any of 10gen, Couchbase, DataStax, or Cloudant.*
That said, the problem may lie more on the supply side than in demand. Developing a competitive SQL DBMS turns out to be harder than developing something in the NoSQL state of the art.
IBM Pure jargon
As best I can tell, IBM now has three related families of hardware/software bundles, aka appliances, aka PureSystems, aka something that sounds like “expert system” but in fact has nothing to do with the traditional rules-engine meaning of that term. In particular,
- One of the three families is for the data tier, under the name PureData. That’s what’s new today.
- One of the three families is for the application tier, under the name PureApplication. More information can be found here.
- One of the three families is for “infrastructure”, under the name PureFlex. More information can be found here.
Within the PureData line, there are three sub-families:
- One is based on DB2 pureScale and is said to be “optimized exclusively for transactional data workloads”.
- One is based on Netezza, and is said to be “optimized exclusively for analytic workloads”.
- One is based on DB2 with the shared-nothing option, and is said to be “optimized exclusively for operational analytic data workloads”, notwithstanding that the underlying software has for years been IBM’s flagship general-purpose (non-mainframe) DBMS.
The Netezza part of the story seems to start:
- The Netezza name is being deprecated, except insofar as certain PureData systems are “Powered by Netezza Technology.”
- Netezza didn’t trumpet slipstream hardware enhancements even when it was independent, and IBM sure isn’t reversing that policy now.
- The Netezza software has been enhanced, most notably in a ~20X improvement in concurrency for “tactical” queries.
Perhaps someday I’ll be able to supply interesting details, for example about the concurrency improvement or about the uses (if any) customers are finding for Netezza’s in-database analytics — but as previously noted, analyzing big companies is hard.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, IBM and DB2, Netezza, OLTP | 4 Comments |
Integrated internet system design
What are the central challenges in internet system design? We probably all have similar lists, comprising issues such as scale, scale-out, throughput, availability, security, programming ease, UI, or general cost-effectiveness. Screw those up, and you don’t have an internet business.
Much new technology addresses those challenges, with considerable success. But the success is usually one silo at a time — a short-request application here, an analytic database there. When it comes to integration, unsolved problems abound.
The top integration and integration-like challenges for me, from a practical standpoint, are:
- Integrating silos — a decades-old problem still with us in a big way.
- Dynamic schemas with joins.
- Low-latency business intelligence.
- Human real-time personalization.
Other concerns that get mentioned include:
- Geographical distribution due to privacy laws, which for some users is a major requirement for compliance.
- Logical data warehouse, a term that doesn’t actually mean anything real.
- In-memory data grids, which some day may no longer always be hand-coupled to the application and data stacks they accelerate.
Let’s skip those latter issues for now, focusing instead on the first four.
Notes on some basic database terminology
In a call Monday with a prominent company, I was told:
- Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and Vertica aren’t relational.
- Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and Vertica are all data warehouse appliances.
That, to put it mildly, is not accurate. So I shall try, yet again, to set the record straight.
In an industry where people often call a DBMS just a “database” — so that a database is something that manages a database! — one may wonder why I bother. Anyhow …
1. The products commonly known as Oracle, Exadata, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, Teradata, Sybase IQ, Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster, Infobright, SAND, ParAccel, Exasol, Kognitio et al. all either are or incorporate relational database management systems, aka RDBMS or relational DBMS.
2. In principle, there can be difficulties in judging whether or not a DBMS is “relational”. In practice, those difficulties don’t arise — yet. Every significant DBMS still falls into one of two categories:
- Relational:
- Was designed to do relational stuff* from the get-go, even if it now does other things too.
- Supports a lot of SQL.
- Non-relational:
- Was designed primarily to do non-relational things.*
- Doesn’t support all that much SQL.
*I expect the distinction to get more confusing soon, at which point I’ll adopt terms more precise than “relational things” and “relational stuff”.
3. There are two chief kinds of relational DBMS: Read more
Clustrix 4.0 and other Clustrix stuff
It feels like time to write about Clustrix, which I last covered in detail in May, 2010, and which is releasing Clustrix 4.0 today. Clustrix and Clustrix 4.0 basics include:
- Clustrix makes a short-request processing appliance.
- As you might guess from the name, Clustrix is clustered — peer-to-peer, with no head node.
- The Clustrix appliance uses flash/solid-state storage.
- Traditionally, Clustrix has run a MySQL-compatible DBMS.
- Clustrix 4.0 introduces JSON support. More on that below.
- Clustrix 4.0 introduces a bunch of administrative features, and parallel backup.
- Also in today’s announcement is a Rackspace partnership to offer Clustrix remotely, at monthly pricing.
- Clustrix has been shipping product for about 4 years.
- Clustrix has 20 customers in production, running >125 Clustrix nodes total.
- Clustrix has 60 people.
- List price for a (smallest size) Clustrix system is $150K for 3 nodes. Highest-end maintenance costs 15%.
- There’s also a $100K version meant for high availability/disaster recovery. Over half of Clustrix’s customers use off-site disaster recovery.
- Clustrix is raising a C round. Part of it has already been raised from insiders, as a kind of bridge.
The biggest Clustrix installation seems to be 20 nodes or so. Others seem to have 10+. I presume those disaster recovery customers have 6 or more nodes each. I’m not quite sure how the arithmetic on that all works; perhaps the 125ish count of nodes is a bit low.
Clustrix technical notes include: Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, Clustering, Clustrix, Database compression, Market share and customer counts, MySQL, OLTP, Pricing, Structured documents | 4 Comments |
Database diversity revisited
From time to time, I try to step back and build a little taxonomy for the variety in database technology. One effort was 4 1/2 years ago, in a pre-planned exchange with Mike Stonebraker (his side, alas, has since been taken down). A year ago I spelled out eight kinds of analytic database.
The angle I’ll take this time is to say that every sufficiently large enterprise needs to be cognizant of at least 7 kinds of database challenge. General notes on that include:
- I’m using the weasel words “database challenge” to evade questions as to what is or isn’t exactly a DBMS.
- One “challenge” can call for multiple products and technologies even within a single enterprise, let alone at different ones. For example, in this post the “eight kinds of analytic database” are reduced to just a single category.
- Even so, one product or technology may be well-suited to address a couple different kinds of challenges.
The Big Seven database challenges that almost any enterprise faces are: Read more
Is salesforce.com going to stick with Oracle?
Surprisingly often, I’m asked “Is salesforce.com going to stick with Oracle?” So let me refer to and expand upon my previous post about salesforce.com’s database architecture by saying:
- Today, salesforce.com uses Oracle as one of several ways to store data.
- salesforce.com’s use of Oracle isn’t very relational.
- salesforce.com is investing in HBase, after exploring other NoSQL options.
- salesforce.com surely has a very inexpensive Oracle license, reducing pressure to move any time soon. However …
- … salesforce.com’s use of Oracle has flipped from being a marketing advantage to a marketing liability.*
- It will be some years before any NoSQL option is mature enough to handle salesforce.com’s work.
- Especially through Heroku, salesforce.com is getting ever more experience with PostgreSQL.
Some day, Marc Benioff will probably say “We turned off Oracle across most of our applications a while ago, and nobody outside the company even noticed.”
*in that
- The marketing benefit “Oracle — it’s what the trustworthy big boys use” hardly matters any more.
- The marketing annoyance of Larry Ellison citing salesforce.com’s use of Oracle keeps growing.
Note: This blog post is less readable than it would be if I’d found a better workaround to WordPress’ bugs in the area of nested bullet points. I’m sorry.
| Categories: NoSQL, OLTP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 10 Comments |