MarkLogic
Analysis of Mark Logic and its Marklogic Server search-friendly XML DBMS product. Related subjects include:
- Native XML database management
- Text data management
- (in Text Technologies) Mark Logic viewed from a text search perspective
Readings in Database Systems
Mike Stonebraker and Larry Ellison have numerous things in common. If nothing else:
- They’re both titanic figures in the database industry.
- They both gave me testimonials on the home page of my business website.
- They both have been known to use the present tense when the future tense would be more accurate. 🙂
I mention the latter because there’s a new edition of Readings in Database Systems, aka the Red Book, available online, courtesy of Mike, Joe Hellerstein and Peter Bailis. Besides the recommended-reading academic papers themselves, there are 12 survey articles by the editors, and an occasional response where, for example, editors disagree. Whether or not one chooses to tackle the papers themselves — and I in fact have not dived into them — the commentary is of great interest.
But I would not take every word as the gospel truth, especially when academics describe what they see as commercial market realities. In particular, as per my quip in the first paragraph, the data warehouse market has not yet gone to the extremes that Mike suggests,* if indeed it ever will. And while Joe is close to correct when he says that the company Essbase was acquired by Oracle, what actually happened is that Arbor Software, which made Essbase, merged with Hyperion Software, and the latter was eventually indeed bought by the giant of Redwood Shores.**
*When it comes to data warehouse market assessment, Mike seems to often be ahead of the trend.
**Let me interrupt my tweaking of very smart people to confess that my own commentary on the Oracle/Hyperion deal was not, in retrospect, especially prescient.
Mike pretty much opened the discussion with a blistering attack against hierarchical data models such as JSON or XML. To a first approximation, his views might be summarized as: Read more
Couchbase 4.0 and related subjects
I last wrote about Couchbase in November, 2012, around the time of Couchbase 2.0. One of the many new features I mentioned then was secondary indexing. Ravi Mayuram just checked in to tell me about Couchbase 4.0. One of the important new features he mentioned was what I think he said was Couchbase’s “first version” of secondary indexing. Obviously, I’m confused.
Now that you’re duly warned, let me remind you of aspects of Couchbase timeline.
- 2 corporate name changes ago, Couchbase was organized to commercialize memcached. memcached, of course, was internet companies’ default way to scale out short-request processing before the rise of NoSQL, typically backed by manually sharded MySQL.
- Couchbase’s original value proposition, under the name Membase, was to provide persistence and of course support for memcached. This later grew into a caching-oriented pitch even to customers who weren’t already memcached users.
- A merger with the makers of CouchDB ensued, with the intention of replacing Membase’s SQLite back end with CouchDB at the same time as JSON support was introduced. This went badly.
- By now, however, Couchbase sells for more than distributed cache use cases. Ravi rattled off a variety of big-name customer examples for system-of-record kinds of use cases, especially in session logging (duh) and also in travel reservations.
- Couchbase 4.0 has been in beta for a few months.
Technical notes on Couchbase 4.0 — and related riffs 🙂 — start: Read more
21st Century DBMS success and failure
As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.
DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.
In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.
Buyer inertia is a greater concern.
- A significant minority of enterprises are highly committed to their enterprise DBMS standards.
- Another significant minority aren’t quite as committed, but set pretty high bars for new DBMS products to cross nonetheless.
- FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about new DBMS is often justifiable, about stability and consistent performance alike.
A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.
- First the newer products (from Netezza onwards) were sold to organizations who knew they wanted great performance or price/performance.
- Then it became more about selling “business value” to organizations who needed more convincing about the benefits of great price/performance.
- Then the behemoth vendors became more competitive, as Teradata introduced lower-price models, Oracle introduced Exadata, Sybase got more aggressive with Sybase IQ, IBM bought Netezza, EMC bought Greenplum, HP bought Vertica and so on. It is now hard for a non-behemoth analytic RDBMS vendor to make headway at large enterprise accounts.
- Meanwhile, Hadoop has emerged as serious competitor for at least some analytic data management, especially but not only at internet companies.
Otherwise I’d say: Read more
Comments on the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems is out. “Operational” seems to be Gartner’s term for what I call short-request, in each case the point being that OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) is a dubious term when systems omit strict consistency, and when even strictly consistent systems may lack full transactional semantics. As is usually the case with Gartner Magic Quadrants:
- I admire the raw research.
- The opinions contained are generally reasonable (especially since Merv Adrian joined the Gartner team).
- Some of the details are questionable.
- There’s generally an excessive focus on Gartner’s perception of vendors’ business skills, and on vendors’ willingness to parrot all the buzzphrases Gartner wants to hear.
- The trends Gartner highlights are similar to those I see, although our emphasis may be different, and they may leave some important ones out. (Big omission — support for lightweight analytics integrated into operational applications, one of the more genuine forms of real-time analytics.)
Anyhow: Read more
Some notes on new-era data management, March 31, 2013
Hmm. I probably should have broken this out as three posts rather than one after all. Sorry about that.
Performance confusion
Discussions of DBMS performance are always odd, for starters because:
- Workloads and use cases vary greatly.
- In particular, benchmarks such as the YCSB or TPC-H aren’t very helpful.
But in NoSQL/NewSQL short-request processing performance claims seem particularly confused. Reasons include but are not limited to:
- It’s common for databases or at least working sets to be entirely in RAM — but it’s not always required.
- Consistency and durability models vary. What’s more, in some systems — e.g. MongoDB — there’s considerable flexibility as to which model you use.
- In particular, there’s an increasingly common choice in which data is written synchronously to RAM on 2 or more servers, then asynchronously to disk on each of them. Performance in these cases can be quite different from when all writes need to be committed to disk. Of course, you need sufficient disk I/O to keep up, so SSDs (Solid-State Drives) can come in handy.
- Many workloads are inherently single node (replication aside). Others are not.
MongoDB and 10gen
I caught up with Ron Avnur at 10gen. Technical highlights included: Read more
DBMS development and other subjects
The cardinal rules of DBMS development
Rule 1: Developing a good DBMS requires 5-7 years and tens of millions of dollars.
That’s if things go extremely well.
Rule 2: You aren’t an exception to Rule 1.
In particular:
- Concurrent workloads benchmarked in the lab are poor predictors of concurrent performance in real life.
- Mixed workload management is harder than you’re assuming it is.
- Those minor edge cases in which your Version 1 product works poorly aren’t minor after all.
DBMS with Hadoop underpinnings …
… aren’t exceptions to the cardinal rules of DBMS development. That applies to Impala (Cloudera), Stinger (Hortonworks), and Hadapt, among others. Fortunately, the relevant vendors seem to be well aware of this fact. Read more
One database to rule them all?
Perhaps the single toughest question in all database technology is: Which different purposes can a single data store serve well? — or to phrase it more technically — Which different usage patterns can a single data store support efficiently? Ted Codd was on multiple sides of that issue, first suggesting that relational DBMS could do everything and then averring they could not. Mike Stonebraker too has been on multiple sides, first introducing universal DBMS attempts with Postgres and Illustra/Informix, then more recently suggesting the world needs 9 or so kinds of database technology. As for me — well, I agreed with Mike both times. 🙂
Since this is MUCH too big a subject for a single blog post, what I’ll do in this one is simply race through some background material. To a first approximation, this whole discussion is mainly about data layouts — but only if we interpret that concept broadly enough to comprise:
- Every level of storage (disk, RAM, etc.).
- Indexes, aggregates and raw data alike.
To date, nobody has ever discovered a data layout that is efficient for all usage patterns. As a general rule, simpler data layouts are often faster to write, while fancier ones can boost query performance. Specific tradeoffs include, but hardly are limited to: Read more
Our clients, and where they are located
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below, the first since a little over a year ago. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Excluded from this round of disclosure is one vendor I have never written about.
- Included in this round of disclosure is one client paying for services partly in stock. All our other clients are cash-only.
For reasons explained below, I’ll group the clients geographically. Obviously, companies often have multiple locations, but this is approximately how it works from the standpoint of their interactions with me. Read more
Big data terminology and positioning
Recently, I observed that Big Data terminology is seriously broken. It is reasonable to reduce the subject to two quasi-dimensions:
- Bigness — Volume, Velocity, size
- Structure — Variety, Variability, Complexity
given that
- High-velocity “big data” problems are usually high-volume as well.*
- Variety, variability, and complexity all relate to the simply-structured/poly-structured distinction.
But the conflation should stop there.
*Low-volume/high-velocity problems are commonly referred to as “event processing” and/or “streaming”.
When people claim that bigness and structure are the same issue, they oversimplify into mush. So I think we need four pieces of terminology, reflective of a 2×2 matrix of possibilities. For want of better alternatives, my suggestions are:
- Relational big data is data of high volume that fits well into a relational DBMS.
- Multi-structured big data is data of high volume that doesn’t fit well into a relational DBMS. Alternative: Poly-structured big data.
- Conventional relational data is data of not-so-high volume that fits well into a relational DBMS. Alternatives: Ordinary/normal/smaller relational data.
- Smaller poly-structured data is data for which dynamic schema capabilities are important, but which doesn’t rise to “big data” volume.
MarkLogic’s Hadoop connector
It’s time to circle back to a subject I skipped when I otherwise wrote about MarkLogic 5: MarkLogic’s new Hadoop connector.
Most of what’s confusing about the MarkLogic Hadoop Connector lies in two pairs of options it presents you:
- Hadoop can talk XQuery to MarkLogic. But alternatively, Hadoop can use a long-established simple(r) Java API for streaming documents into or out of a MarkLogic database.
- Hadoop can make requests to MarkLogic in MarkLogic’s normal mode of operation, namely to address any node in the MarkLogic cluster, which then serves as a “head” node for the duration of that particular request. But alternatively, Hadoop can use a long-standing MarkLogic option to circumvent the whole DBMS cluster and only talk to one specific MarkLogic node.
Otherwise, the whole thing is just what you would think:
- Hadoop can read from and write to MarkLogic, in parallel at both ends.
- If Hadoop is just writing to MarkLogic, there’s a good chance the process is properly called “ETL.”
- If Hadoop is reading a lot from MarkLogic, there’s a good chance the process is properly called “batch analytics.”
MarkLogic said that it wrote this Hadoop connector itself.