DBMS product categories
Analysis of database management technology in specific product categories. Related subjects include:
A partial overview of Netezza database software technology
Netezza is having its user conference Enzee Universe in Boston Monday–Wednesday, June 21-23, and naturally will be announcing new products there, and otherwise providing hooks and inducements to get itself written about. (The preliminary count is seven press releases in all.) To get a head start, I stopped by Netezza Thursday for meetings that included a 3 ½ hour session with 10 or so senior engineers, and have exchanged some clarifying emails since. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Theory and architecture, Workload management | 15 Comments |
Notes on a spate of Netezza-related blog posts
Fearing that last year’s tight travel budgets would hamper attendance, Netezza – like a number of other vendors – decided to forgo a traditional user conference. Instead, it took its Enzee Universe show on the road, essentially spreading the conference across eight cities. I was asked to keynote six of the installments.
After the first one, Netezza Marketing VP Tim Young took me aside for two pieces of constructive criticism. The surprising one* was that he felt I had been INSUFFICIENTLY critical of Netezza. Since then, every other conversation we’ve had about content creation has also featured ringing reassurances that Tim truly wants independent, non-pandering work.
*The unsurprising one was that I’d rushed. Well, duh. After months of telling me I had a 1 hour slot, Netezza cut me to ½ hour a few days beforehand. And my talk had been designed to be high-speed even in the longer time slot …
As a result, I accepted a subsequent gig from Netezza that I would barely consider from most other vendors. Namely, for this year’s Enzee Universe – June 21-23, aka Monday-Wednesday of this week, at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston – I would do some contemporaneous blogging. The parameters we agreed on included: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Presentations | 3 Comments |
Kickfire update
A Kickfire competitor tipped me off that he got 3 Kickfire salesmen’s resumes in 24 hours. I ran this by Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong, who confirmed that Kickfire has had a layoff, but gave me no further details.
Bruce also told me that Kickfire is now up to 10 paying customers, and that there are repeat deals.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share and customer counts | 3 Comments |
Ingres VectorWise technical highlights
After working through problems w/ travel, cell phones, and so on, Peter Boncz of VectorWise finally caught up with me for a regrettably brief call. Peter gave me the strong impression that what I’d written in the past about VectorWise had been and remained accurate, so I focused on filling in the gaps. Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Analytic technologies, Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Open source, VectorWise | 2 Comments |
Rainstor update
I was tired and cranky when I talked with my former clients at Rainstor (formerly Clearpace) yesterday, so our call was shorter than it otherwise might have been. Anyhow, there’s a new version called Rainstor 4, the two main themes of which are:
- Compliance-specific features.
- Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole.
The point is that Rainstor is focusing its efforts on enterprises that: Read more
VoltDB finally launches
VoltDB is finally launching today. As is common for companies in sectors I write about, VoltDB — or just “Volt” — has discovered the virtues of embargoes that end 12:01 am. Let’s go straight to the technical highlights:
- VoltDB is based on the H-Store technology, which I wrote about in February, 2009. Most of what I said about H-Store then applies to VoltDB today.
- VoltDB is a no-apologies ACID relational DBMS, which runs entirely in RAM.
- VoltDB has rather limited SQL. (One example: VoltDB can’t do SUMs in SQL.) However, VoltDB guy Tim Callaghan (Mark Callaghan’s lesser-known but nonetheless smart brother) asserts that if you code up the missing functionality, it’s almost as fast as if it were present in the DBMS to begin with, because there’s no added I/O from the handoff between the DBMS and the procedural code. (The data’s in RAM one way or the other.)
- VoltDB’s Big Conceptual Performance Story is that it does away with most locks, latches, logs, etc., and also most context switching.
- In particular, you’re supposed to partition your data and architect your application so that most transactions execute on a single core. When you can do that, you get VoltDB’s performance benefits. To the extent you can’t, you’re in two-phase-commit performance land. (More precisely, you’re doing 2PC for multi-core writes, which is surely a major reason that multi-core reads are a lot faster in VoltDB than multi-core writes.)
- VoltDB has a little less than one DBMS thread per core. When the data partitioning works as it should, you execute a complete transaction in that single thread. Poof. No context switching.
- A transaction in VoltDB is a Java stored procedure. (The early idea of Ruby on Rails in lieu of the Java/SQL combo didn’t hold up performance-wise.)
- Solid-state memory is not a viable alternative to RAM for VoltDB. Too slow.
- Instead, VoltDB lets you snapshot data to disk at tunable intervals. “Continuous” is one of the options, wherein a new snapshot starts being made as soon as the last one completes.
- In addition, VoltDB will also spool a kind of transaction log to the target of your choice. (Obvious choice: An analytic DBMS such as Vertica, but there’s no such connectivity partnership actually in place at this time.)
Further quick SAP/Sybase reactions
Raj Nathan of Sybase has been calling around to chat quickly about the SAP/Sybase deal and related matters. Talking with Raj didn’t change any of my initial reactions to SAP’s acquisition of Sybase. I also didn’t bother Raj with too many hard questions, as he was clearly in call-and-reassure mode, reaching out to customers and influencers alike.
That said, Read more
Quick reactions to SAP acquiring Sybase
SAP is acquiring Sybase. On the conference call SAP said Sybase would be run as a separate division of SAP (no surprise). Most of the focus was on Sybase’s mobile technology, which is forecast at >$400 million in 2010 revenues (which would be 30%ish of the total). My quick reactions include: Read more
The Clustrix story
After my recent post, the Clustrix guys raised their hands and briefed me. Takeaways included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Clustrix, Emulation, transparency, portability, Games and virtual worlds, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Parallelization, Solid-state memory | 8 Comments |
Clarifying the state of MPP in-database SAS
I routinely am briefed way in advance of products’ introductions. For that reason and others, it can be hard for me to keep straight what’s been officially announced, introduced for test, introduced for general availability, vaguely planned for the indefinite future, and so on. Perhaps nothing has confused me more in that regard than the SAS Institute’s multi-year effort to get SAS integrated into various MPP DBMS, specifically Teradata, Netezza Twinfin(i), and Aster Data nCluster.
However, I chatted briefly Thursday with Michelle Wilkie, who is the SAS product manager overseeing all this (and also some other stuff, like SAS running on grids without being integrated into a DBMS). As best I understood, the story is: Read more