Introduction to Crate.io and CrateDB
Crate.io and CrateDB basics include:
- Crate.io makes CrateDB.
- CrateDB is a quasi-RDBMS designed to receive sensor data and similar IoT (Internet of Things) inputs.
- CrateDB’s creators were perhaps a little slow to realize that the “R” part was needed, but are playing catch-up in that regard.
- Crate.io is an outfit founded by Austrian guys, headquartered in Berlin, that is turning into a San Francisco company.
- Crate.io says it has 22 employees and 5 paying customers.
- Crate.io cites bigger numbers than that for confirmed production users, clearly active clusters, and overall product downloads.
In essence, CrateDB is an open source and less mature alternative to MemSQL. The opportunity for MemSQL and CrateDB alike exists in part because analytic RDBMS vendors didn’t close it off.
CrateDB’s not-just-relational story starts:
- A column can contain ordinary values (of usual-suspect datatypes) or “objects”, …
- … where “objects” presumably are the kind of nested/hierarchical structures that are common in the NoSQL/internet-backend world, …
- … except when they’re just BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects).
- There’s a way to manually define “strict schemas” on the structured objects, and a syntax for navigating their structure in WHERE clauses.
- There’s also a way to automagically infer “dynamic schemas”, but it’s simplistic enough to be more suitable for development/prototyping than for serious production.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data models and architecture, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, GIS and geospatial, MemSQL, NoSQL, Open source, Structured documents | 3 Comments |
“Real-time” is getting real
I’ve been an analyst for 35 years, and debates about “real-time” technology have run through my whole career. Some of those debates are by now pretty much settled. In particular:
- Yes, interactive computer response is crucial.
- Into the 1980s, many apps were batch-only. Demand for such apps dried up.
- Business intelligence should occur at interactive speeds, which is a major reason that there’s a market for high-performance analytic RDBMS.
- Theoretical arguments about “true” real-time vs. near-real-time are often pointless.
- What matters in most cases is human users’ perceptions of speed.
- Most of the exceptions to that rule occur when machines race other machines, for example in automated bidding (high frequency trading or otherwise) or in network security.
A big issue that does remain open is: How fresh does data need to be? My preferred summary answer is: As fresh as is needed to support the best decision-making. I think that formulation starts with several advantages:
- It respects the obvious point that different use cases require different levels of data freshness.
- It cautions against people who think they need fresh information but aren’t in a position to use it. (Such users have driven much bogus “real-time” demand in the past.)
- It covers cases of both human and automated decision-making.
Straightforward applications of this principle include: Read more
Are analytic RDBMS and data warehouse appliances obsolete?
I used to spend most of my time — blogging and consulting alike — on data warehouse appliances and analytic DBMS. Now I’m barely involved with them. The most obvious reason is that there have been drastic changes in industry structure:
- Many of the independent vendors were swooped up by acquisition.
- None of those acquisitions was a big success.
- Microsoft did little with DATAllegro.
- Netezza struggled with R&D after being bought by IBM. An IBMer recently told me that their main analytic RDBMS engine was BLU.
- I hear about Vertica more as a technology to be replaced than as a significant ongoing market player.
- Pivotal open-sourced Greenplum. I have detected few people who care.
- Ditto for Actian’s offerings.
- Teradata claimed a few large Aster accounts, but I never hear of Aster as something to compete or partner with.
- Smaller vendors fizzled too. Hadapt and Kickfire went to Teradata as more-or-less acquihires. InfiniDB folded. Etc.
- Impala and other Hadoop-based alternatives are technology options.
- Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and to some extent SAP/Sybase are still pedaling along … but I rarely talk with companies that big. 🙂
Simply reciting all that, however, begs the question of whether one should still care about analytic RDBMS at all.
My answer, in a nutshell, is:
Analytic RDBMS — whether on premises in software, in the form of data warehouse appliances, or in the cloud — are still great for hard-core business intelligence, where “hard-core” can refer to ad-hoc query complexity, reporting/dashboard concurrency, or both. But they aren’t good for much else.
Notes from a long trip, July 19, 2016
For starters:
- I spent three weeks in California on a hybrid personal/business trip. I had a bunch of meetings, but not three weeks’ worth.
- The timing was awkward for most companies I wanted to see. No blame accrues to those who didn’t make themselves available.
- I came back with a nasty cough. Follow-up phone calls aren’t an option until next week.
- I’m impatient to start writing. Hence tonight’s posts. But it’s difficult for a man and his cough to be productive at the same time.
A running list of recent posts is:
- As a companion to this post, I’m publishing a very long one on vendor lock-in.
- Spark and Databricks are both prospering, and of course enhancing their technology as well.
- Ditto DataStax.
- Flink is interesting as the streaming technology it’s now positioned to be, rather than the overall Spark alternative it used to be positioned as but which the world didn’t need.
Subjects I’d like to add to that list include:
- MemSQL, Zoomdata, and Neo Technology (also prospering).
- Cloudera (multiple topics, as usual).
- Analytic SQL engines (“traditional” analytic RDBMS aren’t doing well).
- Microsoft’s reinvention (it feels real).
- Metadata (it’s ever more of a thing).
- Machine learning (it’s going to be a big portion of my research going forward).
- Transitions to the cloud — this subject affects almost everything else.
MemSQL 4.0
I talked with my clients at MemSQL about the release of MemSQL 4.0. Let’s start with the reminders:
- MemSQL started out as in-memory OTLP (OnLine Transaction Processing) DBMS …
- … but quickly positioned with “We also do ‘real-time’ analytic processing” …
- … and backed that up by adding a flash-based column store option …
- … before Gartner ever got around to popularizing the term HTAP (Hybrid Transaction and Analytic Processing).
- There’s also a JSON option.
The main new aspects of MemSQL 4.0 are:
- Geospatial indexing. This is for me the most interesting part.
- A new optimizer and, I suppose, query planner …
- … which in particular allow for serious distributed joins.
- Some rather parallel-sounding connectors to Spark. Hadoop and Amazon S3.
- Usual-suspect stuff including:
- More SQL coverage (I forgot to ask for details).
- Some added or enhanced administrative/tuning/whatever tools (again, I forgot to ask for details).
- Surely some general Bottleneck Whack-A-Mole.
There’s also a new free MemSQL “Community Edition”. MemSQL hopes you’ll experiment with this but not use it in production. And MemSQL pricing is now wholly based on RAM usage, so the column store is quasi-free from a licensing standpoint is as well.
Notes on indexes and index-like structures
Indexes are central to database management.
- My first-ever stock analyst report, in 1982, correctly predicted that index-based DBMS would supplant linked-list ones …
- … and to this day, if one wants to retrieve a small fraction of a database, indexes are generally the most efficient way to go.
- Recently, I’ve had numerous conversations in which indexing strategies played a central role.
Perhaps it’s time for a round-up post on indexing. 🙂
1. First, let’s review some basics. Classically:
- An index is a DBMS data structure that you probe to discover where to find the data you really want.
- Indexes make data retrieval much more selective and hence faster.
- While indexes make queries cheaper, they make writes more expensive — because when you write data, you need to update your index as well.
- Indexes also induce costs in database size and administrative efforts. (Manual index management is often the biggest hurdle for “zero-DBA” RDBMS installations.)
2. Further: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Database compression, GIS and geospatial, Google, MapReduce, McObject, MemSQL, MySQL, ScaleDB, solidDB, Sybase, Text, Tokutek and TokuDB | 18 Comments |
Hadoop’s next refactoring?
I believe in all of the following trends:
- Hadoop is a Big Deal, and here to stay.
- Spark, for most practical purposes, is becoming a big part of Hadoop.
- Most servers will be operated away from user premises, whether via SaaS (Software as a Service), co-location, or “true” cloud computing.
Trickier is the meme that Hadoop is “the new OS”. My thoughts on that start:
- People would like this to be true, although in most cases only as one of several cluster computing platforms.
- Hadoop, when viewed as an operating system, is extremely primitive.
- Even so, the greatest awkwardness I’m seeing when different software shares a Hadoop cluster isn’t actually in scheduling, but rather in data interchange.
There is also a minor issue that if you distribute your Hadoop work among extra nodes you might have to pay a bit more to your Hadoop distro support vendor. Fortunately, the software industry routinely solves more difficult pricing problems than that.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Hadoop, MapReduce, MemSQL, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 15 Comments |
Thoughts and notes, Thanksgiving weekend 2014
I’m taking a few weeks defocused from work, as a kind of grandpaternity leave. That said, the venue for my Dances of Infant Calming is a small-but-nice apartment in San Francisco, so a certain amount of thinking about tech industries is inevitable. I even found time last Tuesday to meet or speak with my clients at WibiData, MemSQL, Cloudera, Citus Data, and MongoDB. And thus:
1. I’ve been sloppy in my terminology around “geo-distribution”, in that I don’t always make it easy to distinguish between:
- Storing different parts of a database in different geographies, often for reasons of data privacy regulatory compliance.
- Replicating an entire database into different geographies, often for reasons of latency and/or availability/ disaster recovery,
The latter case can be subdivided further depending on whether multiple copies of the data can accept first writes (aka active-active, multi-master, or multi-active), or whether there’s a clear single master for each part of the database.
What made me think of this was a phone call with MongoDB in which I learned that the limit on number of replicas had been raised from 12 to 50, to support the full-replication/latency-reduction use case.
2. Three years ago I posted about agile (predictive) analytics. One of the points was:
… if you change your offers, prices, ad placement, ad text, ad appearance, call center scripts, or anything else, you immediately gain new information that isn’t well-reflected in your previous models.
Subsequently I’ve been hearing more about predictive experimentation such as bandit testing. WibiData, whose views are influenced by a couple of Very Famous Department Store clients (one of which is Macy’s), thinks experimentation is quite important. And it could be argued that experimentation is one of the simplest and most direct ways to increase the value of your data.
3. I’d further say that a number of developments, trends or possibilities I’m seeing are or could be connected. These include agile and experimental predictive analytics in general, as noted in the previous point, along with: Read more
Some stuff on my mind, September 28, 2014
1. I wish I had some good, practical ideas about how to make a political difference around privacy and surveillance. Nothing else we discuss here is remotely as important. I presumably can contribute an opinion piece to, more or less, the technology publication(s) of my choice; that can have a small bit of impact. But I’d love to do better than that. Ideas, anybody?
2. A few thoughts on cloud, colocation, etc.:
- The economies of scale of colocation-or-cloud over operating your own data center are compelling. Most of the reasons you outsource hardware manufacture to Asia also apply to outsourcing data center operation within the United States. (The one exception I can think of is supply chain.)
- The arguments for cloud specifically over colocation are less persuasive. Colo providers can even match cloud deployments in rapid provisioning and elastic pricing, if they so choose.
- Surely not coincidentally, I am told that Rackspace is deemphasizing cloud, reemphasizing colocation, and making a big deal out of Open Compute. In connection with that, Rackspace has pulled back from its leadership role in OpenStack.
- I’m hearing much more mention of Amazon Redshift than I used to. It seems to have a lot of traction as a simple and low-cost option.
- I’m hearing less about Elastic MapReduce than I used to, although I imagine usage is still large and growing.
- In general, I get the impression that progress is being made in overcoming the inherent difficulties in cloud (and even colo) parallel analytic processing. But it all still seems pretty vague, except for the specific claims being made for traction of Redshift, EMR, and so on.
- Teradata recently told me that in colocation pricing, it is common for floor space to be everything, with power not separately metered. But I don’t think that trend is a big deal, as it is not necessarily permanent.
- Cloud hype is of course still with us.
- Other than the above, I stand by my previous thoughts on appliances, clusters and clouds.
3. As for the analytic DBMS industry: Read more
MemSQL update
I stopped by MemSQL last week, and got a range of new or clarified information. For starters:
- Even though MemSQL (the product) was originally designed for OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing), MemSQL (the company) is now focused on analytic use cases …
- … which was the point of introducing MemSQL’s flash-based columnar option.
- One MemSQL customer has a 100 TB “data warehouse” installation on Amazon.
- Another has “dozens” of terabytes of data spread across 500 machines, which aggregate 36 TB of RAM.
- At customer Shutterstock, 1000s of non-MemSQL nodes are monitored by 4 MemSQL machines.
- A couple of MemSQL’s top references are also Vertica flagship customers; one of course is Zynga.
- MemSQL reports encountering Clustrix and VoltDB in a few competitive situations, but not NuoDB. MemSQL believes that VoltDB is still hampered by its traditional issues — Java, reliance on stored procedures, etc.
On the more technical side: Read more