Theory and architecture
Analysis of design choices in databases and database management systems. Related subjects include:
- Any subcategory
- Database diversity
- Explicit support for specific data types
- (in Text Technologies) Text search
A new logical data layer?
I’m skeptical of data federation. I’m skeptical of all-things-to-all-people claims about logical data layers, and in particular of Gartner’s years-premature “Logical Data Warehouse” buzzphrase. Still, a reasonable number of my clients are stealthily trying to do some kind of data layer middleware, as are other vendors more openly, and I don’t think they’re all crazy.
Here are some thoughts as to why, and also as to challenges that need to be overcome.
There are many things a logical data layer might be trying to facilitate — writing, querying, batch data integration, real-time data integration and more. That said:
- When you’re writing data, you want it to be banged into a sufficiently-durable-to-acknowledge condition fast. If acknowledgements are slow, performance nightmares can ensue. So writing is the last place you want an extra layer, perhaps unless you’re content with the durability provided by an in-memory data grid.
- Queries are important. Also, they formally are present in other tasks, such as data transformation and movement. That’s why data manipulation packages (originally Pig, now Hive and fuller SQL) are so central to Hadoop.
More notes on HBase
1. Continuing from last week’s HBase post, the Cloudera folks were fairly proud of HBase’s features for performance and scalability. Indeed, they suggested that use cases which were a good technical match for HBase were those that required fast random reads and writes with high concurrency and strict consistency. Some of the HBase architecture for query performance seems to be:
- Everything is stored in sorted files. (I didn’t probe as to what exactly the files were sorted on.)
- Files have indexes and optional Bloom filters.
- Files are marked with min/max field values and time stamp ranges, which helps with data skipping.
Notwithstanding that a couple of those features sound like they might help with analytic queries, the base expectation is that you’ll periodically massage your HBase data into a more analytically-oriented form. For example — I was talking with Cloudera after all — you could put it into Parquet.
2. The discussion of which kinds of data are originally put into HBase was a bit confusing.
- HBase is commonly used to receive machine-generated data. Everybody knows that.
- Cloudera drew a distinction between:
- Straightforward time series, which should probably just go into HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) rather than HBase.
- Data that is bucketed by entity, which likely should go into HBase. Examples of entities are specific users or devices.
- Cloudera also reminded me that OpenTSDB, a popular time series data store, runs over HBase.
OpenTSDB, by the way, likes to store detailed data and aggregates side-by-side, which resembles a pattern I discussed in my recent BI for NoSQL post.
3. HBase supports caching, tiered storage, and so on. Cloudera is pretty sure that it is publicly known (I presume from blog posts or conference talks) that: Read more
| Categories: Cloudera, eBay, Facebook, Hadoop, HBase, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source, Petabyte-scale data management, Specific users, Yahoo | 4 Comments |
BI for NoSQL — some very early comments
Over the past couple years, there have been various quick comments and vague press releases about “BI for NoSQL”. I’ve had trouble, however, imagining what it could amount to that was particularly interesting, with my confusion boiling down to “Just what are you aggregating over what?” Recently I raised the subject with a few leading NoSQL companies. The result is that my confusion was expanded. 🙂 Here’s the small amount that I have actually figured out.
As I noted in a recent post about data models, many databases — in particular SQL and NoSQL ones — can be viewed as collections of <name, value> pairs.
- In a relational database, a record is a collection of <name, value> pairs with a particular and predictable — i.e. derived from the table definition — sequence of names. Further, a record usually has an identifying key (commonly one of the first values).
- Something similar can be said about structured-document stores — i.e. JSON or XML — except that the sequence of names may not be consistent from one document to the next. Further, there’s commonly a hierarchical relationship among the names.
- For these purposes, a “wide-column” NoSQL store like Cassandra or HBase can be viewed much as a structured-document store, albeit with different performance optimizations and characteristics and a different flavor of DML (Data Manipulation Language).
Consequently, a NoSQL database can often be viewed as a table or a collection of tables, except that:
- The NoSQL database is likely to have more null values.
- The NoSQL database, in a naive translation toward relational, may have repeated values. So a less naive translation might require extra tables.
That’s all straightforward to deal with if you’re willing to write scripts to extract the NoSQL data and transform or aggregate it as needed. But things get tricky when you try to insist on some kind of point-and-click. And by the way, that last comment pertains to BI and ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) alike. Indeed, multiple people I talked with on this subject conflated BI and ETL, and they were probably right to do so.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Cassandra, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, HBase, MongoDB, NoSQL, Structured documents | 6 Comments |
Notes on HBase
I talked with a couple of Cloudera folks about HBase last week. Let me frame things by saying:
- The closest thing to an HBase company, ala MongoDB/MongoDB or DataStax/Cassandra, is Cloudera.
- Cloudera still uses a figure of 20% of its customers being HBase-centric.
- HBaseCon and so on notwithstanding, that figure isn’t really reflected in Cloudera’s marketing efforts. Cloudera’s marketing commitment to HBase has never risen to nearly the level of MongoDB’s or DataStax’s push behind their respective core products.
- With Cloudera’s move to “zero/one/many” pricing, Cloudera salespeople have little incentive to push HBase hard to accounts other than HBase-first buyers.
Also:
- Cloudera no longer dominates HBase development, if it ever did.
- Cloudera is the single biggest contributor to HBase, by its count, but doesn’t make a majority of the contributions on its own.
- Cloudera sees Hortonworks as having become a strong HBase contributor.
- Intel is also a strong contributor, as are end user organizations such as Chinese telcos. Not coincidentally, Intel was a major Hadoop provider in China before the Intel/Cloudera deal.
- As far as Cloudera is concerned, HBase is just one data storage technology of several, focused on high-volume, high-concurrency, low-latency short-request processing. Cloudera thinks this is OK because of HBase’s strong integration with the rest of the Hadoop stack.
- Others who may be inclined to disagree are in several cases doing projects on top of HBase to extend its reach. (In particular, please see the discussion below about Apache Phoenix and Trafodion, both of which want to offer relational-like functionality.)
| Categories: Cloudera, Clustering, Data models and architecture, Database diversity, Hadoop, HBase, Hortonworks, HP and Neoview, Intel, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
Some stuff on my mind, March 10, 2015
I found yesterday’s news quite unpleasant.
- A guy I knew and had a brief rivalry with in high school died of colon cancer, a disease that I’m at high risk for myself.
- GigaOm, in my opinion the best tech publication — at least for my interests — shut down.
- The sex discrimination trial around Kleiner Perkins is undermining some people I thought well of.
And by the way, a guy died a few day ago snorkeling at the same resort I like to go to, evidently doing less risky things than I on occasion have.
So I want to unclutter my mind a bit. Here goes.
1. There are a couple of stories involving Sam Simon and me that are too juvenile to tell on myself, even now. But I’ll say that I ran for senior class president, in a high school where the main way to campaign was via a single large poster, against a guy with enough cartoon-drawing talent to be one of the creators of the Simpsons. Oops.
2. If one suffers from ulcerative colitis as my mother did, one is at high risk of getting colon cancer, as she also did. Mine isn’t as bad as hers was, due to better tolerance for medication controlling the disease. Still, I’ve already had a double-digit number of colonoscopies in my life. They’re not fun. I need another one soon; in fact, I canceled one due to the blizzards.
Pro-tip — never, ever have a colonoscopy without some kind of anesthesia or sedation. Besides the unpleasantness, the lack of meds increases the risk that the colonoscopy will tear you open and make things worse. I learned that the hard way in New York in the early 1980s.
3. Five years ago I wrote optimistically about the evolution of the information ecosystem, specifically using the example of the IT sector. One could argue that I was right. After all: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Business intelligence, NoSQL | 1 Comment |
Cask and CDAP
For starters:
- Continuuity toured in 2012 and touted its “app server for Hadoop” technology.
- Continuuity recently changed its name to Cask and went open source.
- Cask’s product is now called CDAP (Cask Data Application Platform). It’s still basically an app server for Hadoop and other “big data” — ouch do I hate that phrase — data stores.
- Cask and Cloudera partnered.
- I got a more technical Cask briefing this week.
Also:
- App servers are a notoriously amorphous technology. The focus of how they’re used can change greatly every couple of years.
- Partly for that reason, I was unimpressed by Continuuity’s original hype-filled positioning.
So far as I can tell:
- Cask’s current focus is to orchestrate job flows, with lots of data mappings.
- This is supposed to provide lots of developer benefits, for fairly obvious reasons. Those are pitched in terms of an integration story, more in a “free you from the mess of a many-part stack” sense than strictly in terms of data integration.
- CDAP already has a GUI to monitor what’s going on. A GUI to specify workflows is coming very soon.
- CDAP doesn’t consume a lot of cycles itself, and hence isn’t a real risk for unpleasant overhead, if “overhead” is narrowly defined. Rather, performance drags could come from …
- … sub-optimal choices in data mapping, database design or workflow composition.
Databricks and Spark update
I chatted last night with Ion Stoica, CEO of my client Databricks, for an update both on his company and Spark. Databricks’ actual business is Databricks Cloud, about which I can say:
- Databricks Cloud is:
- Spark-as-a-Service.
- Currently running on Amazon only.
- Not dependent on Hadoop.
- Databricks Cloud, despite having a 1.0 version number, is not actually in general availability.
- Even so, there are a non-trivial number of paying customers for Databricks Cloud. (Ion gave me an approximate number, but is keeping it NDA until Spark Summit East.)
- Databricks Cloud gets at data from S3 (most commonly), Redshift, Elastic MapReduce, and perhaps other sources I’m forgetting.
- Databricks Cloud was initially focused on ad-hoc use. A few days ago the capability was added to schedule jobs and so on.
- Unsurprisingly, therefore, Databricks Cloud has been used to date mainly for data exploration/visualization and ETL (Extract/Transform/Load). Visualizations tend to be scripted/programmatic, but there’s also an ODBC driver used for Tableau access and so on.
- Databricks Cloud customers are concentrated (but not unanimously so) in the usual-suspect internet-centric business sectors.
- The low end of the amount of data Databricks Cloud customers are working with is 100s of gigabytes. This isn’t surprising.
- The high end of the amount of data Databricks Cloud customers are working with is petabytes. That did surprise me, and in retrospect I should have pressed for details.
I do not expect all of the above to remain true as Databricks Cloud matures.
Ion also said that Databricks is over 50 people, and has moved its office from Berkeley to San Francisco. He also offered some Spark numbers, such as: Read more
Data models
7-10 years ago, I repeatedly argued the viewpoints:
- Relational DBMS were the right choice in most cases.
- Multiple kinds of relational DBMS were needed, optimized for different kinds of use case.
- There were a variety of specialized use cases in which non-relational data models were best.
Since then, however:
- Hadoop has flourished.
- NoSQL has flourished.
- Graph DBMS have matured somewhat.
- Much of the action has shifted to machine-generated data, of which there are many kinds.
So it’s probably best to revisit all that in a somewhat organized way.
MongoDB 3.0
Old joke:
- Question: Why do policemen work in pairs?
- Answer: One to read and one to write.
A lot has happened in MongoDB technology over the past year. For starters:
- The big news in MongoDB 3.0* is the WiredTiger storage engine. The top-level claims for that are that one should “typically” expect (individual cases can of course vary greatly):
- 7-10X improvement in write performance.
- No change in read performance (which however was boosted in MongoDB 2.6).
- ~70% reduction in data size due to compression (disk only).
- ~50% reduction in index size due to compression (disk and memory both).
- MongoDB has been adding administration modules.
- A remote/cloud version came out with, if I understand correctly, MongoDB 2.6.
- An on-premise version came out with 3.0.
- They have similar features, but are expected to grow apart from each other over time. They have different names.
*Newly-released MongoDB 3.0 is what was previously going to be MongoDB 2.8. My clients at MongoDB finally decided to give a “bigger” release a new first-digit version number.
To forestall confusion, let me quickly add: Read more
| Categories: Database compression, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MongoDB, NoSQL, Open source, Structured documents, Sybase | 9 Comments |
Where the innovation is
I hoped to write a reasonable overview of current- to medium-term future IT innovation. Yeah, right. 🙂 But if we abandon any hope that this post could be comprehensive, I can at least say:
1. Back in 2011, I ranted against the term Big Data, but expressed more fondness for the V words — Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability. That said, when it comes to data management and movement, solutions to the V problems have generally been sketched out.
- Volume has been solved. There are Hadoop installations with 100s of petabytes of data, analytic RDBMS with 10s of petabytes, general-purpose Exadata sites with petabytes, and 10s/100s of petabytes of analytic Accumulo at the NSA. Further examples abound.
- Velocity is being solved. My recent post on Hadoop-based streaming suggests how. In other use cases, velocity is addressed via memory-centric RDBMS.
- Variety and Variability have been solved. MongoDB, Cassandra and perhaps others are strong NoSQL choices. Schema-on-need is in earlier days, but may help too.
2. Even so, there’s much room for innovation around data movement and management. I’d start with:
- Product maturity is a huge issue for all the above, and will remain one for years.
- Hadoop and Spark show that application execution engines:
- Have a lot of innovation ahead of them.
- Are tightly entwined with data management, and with data movement as well.
- Hadoop is due for another refactoring, focused on both in-memory and persistent storage.
- There are many issues in storage that can affect data technologies as well, including but not limited to:
- Solid-state (flash or post-flash) vs. spinning disk.
- Networked vs. direct-attached.
- Virtualized vs. identifiable-physical.
- Object/file/block.
- Graph analytics and data management are still confused.
3. As I suggested last year, data transformation is an important area for innovation. Read more