Oracle
Analysis of software titan Oracle and its efforts in database management, analytics, and middleware. Related subjects include:
- Oracle TimesTen
- (in The Monash Report)Operational and strategic issues for Oracle
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on Oracle
- Most of what’s written about in this blog
The refactoring of everything
I’ll start with three observations:
- Computer systems can’t be entirely tightly coupled — nothing would ever get developed or tested.
- Computer systems can’t be entirely loosely coupled — nothing would ever get optimized, in performance and functionality alike.
- In an ongoing trend, there is and will be dramatic refactoring as to which connections wind up being loose or tight.
As written, that’s probably pretty obvious. Even so, it’s easy to forget just how pervasive the refactoring is and is likely to be. Let’s survey some examples first, and then speculate about consequences. Read more
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.
Appliances, clusters and clouds
I believe:
- The trend to clustered computing is sustainable.
- The trend to appliances is also sustainable.
- The “single” enterprise cluster is almost as much of a pipe dream as the single enterprise database.
I shall explain.
Arguments for hosting applications on some kind of cluster include:
- If the workload requires more than one server — well, you’re in cluster territory!
- If the workload requires less than one server — throw it into the virtualization pool.
- If the workload is uneven — throw it into the virtualization pool.
Arguments specific to the public cloud include:
- A large fraction of new third-party applications are SaaS (Software as a Service). Those naturally live in the cloud.
- Cloud providers have efficiencies that you don’t.
That’s all pretty compelling. However, these are not persuasive reasons to put everything on a SINGLE cluster or cloud. They could as easily lead you to have your VMware cluster and your Exadata rack and your Hadoop cluster and your NoSQL cluster and your object storage OpenStack cluster — among others — all while participating in several different public clouds as well.
Why would you not move work into a cluster at all? First, if ain’t broken, you might not want to fix it. Some of the cluster options make it easy for you to consolidate existing workloads — that’s a central goal of VMware and Exadata — but others only make sense to adopt in connection with new application projects. Second, you might just want device locality. I have a gaming-class PC next to my desk; it drives a couple of monitors; I like that arrangement. Away from home I carry a laptop computer instead. Arguments can be made for small remote-office servers as well.
| Categories: Cloud computing, Clustering, Data warehouse appliances, Exadata, NoSQL, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 8 Comments |
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
Notes and links, February 17, 2013
1. It boggles my mind that some database technology companies still don’t view compression as a major issue. Compression directly affects storage and bandwidth usage alike — for all kinds of storage (potentially including RAM) and for all kinds of bandwidth (network, I/O, and potentially on-server).
Trading off less-than-maximal compression so as to minimize CPU impact can make sense. Having no compression at all, however, is an admission of defeat.
2. People tend to misjudge Hadoop’s development pace in either of two directions. An overly expansive view is to note that some people working on Hadoop are trying to make it be all things for all people, and to somehow imagine those goals will soon be achieved. An overly narrow view is to note an important missing feature in Hadoop, and think there’s a big business to be made out of offering it alone.
At this point, I’d guess that Cloudera and Hortonworks have 500ish employees combined, many of whom are engineers. That allows for a low double-digit number of 5+ person engineering teams, along with a number of smaller projects. The most urgently needed features are indeed being built. On the other hand, a complete monument to computing will not soon emerge.
3. Schooner’s acquisition by SanDisk has led to the discontinuation of Schooner’s SQL DBMS SchoonerSQL. Schooner’s flash-optimized key-value store Membrain continues. I don’t have details, but the Membrain web page suggests both data store and cache use cases.
4. There’s considerable personnel movement at Boston-area database technology companies right now. Please ping me directly if you care.
Key questions when selecting an analytic RDBMS
I recently complained that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS conflates many use cases into one set of rankings. So perhaps now would be a good time to offer some thoughts on how to tell use cases apart. Assuming you know that you really want to manage your analytic database with a relational DBMS, the first questions you ask yourself could be:
- How big is your database? How big is your budget?
- How do you feel about appliances?
- How do you feel about the cloud?
- What are the size and shape of your workload?
- How fresh does the data need to be?
Let’s drill down. Read more
Comments on Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — evaluations
To my taste, the most glaring mis-rankings in the 2012/2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management are that it is too positive on Kognitio and too negative on Infobright. Secondarily, it is too negative on HP Vertica, and too positive on ParAccel and Actian/VectorWise. So let’s consider those vendors first.
Gartner seems confused about Kognitio’s products and history alike.
- Gartner calls Kognitio an “in-memory” DBMS, which is not accurate.
- Gartner doesn’t remark on Kognitio’s worst-in-class* compression.
- Gartner gives Kognitio oddly high marks for a late, me-too Hadoop integration strategy.
- Gartner writes as if Kognitio’s next attempt at the US market will be the first one, which is not the case.
- Gartner says that Kognitio pioneered data warehouse SaaS (Software as a Service), which actually has existed since the pre-relational 1970s.
Gartner is correct, however, to note that Kognitio doesn’t sell much stuff overall.
* non-existent
In the cases of HP Vertica, Infobright, ParAccel, and Actian/VectorWise, the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management’s facts are fairly accurate, but I dispute Gartner’s evaluation. When it comes to Vertica: Read more
Comments on Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems — concepts
The 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems is out. I’ll split my comments into two posts — this one on concepts, and a companion on specific vendor evaluations.
Links:
- Maintaining working links to Gartner Magic Quadrants is an adventure. But as of early February, 2013, this link seems live.
- I also commented on the 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 Gartner Magic Quadrants for Data Warehouse DBMS.
Let’s start by again noting that I regard Gartner Magic Quadrants as a bad use of good research. On the facts:
- Gartner collects a lot of input from traditional enterprises. I envy that resource.
- Gartner also does a good job of rounding up vendor claims about user base sizes and the like. If nothing else, you should skim the MQ report for that reason.
- Gartner observations about product feature sets are usually correct, although not so consistently that they should be relied on.
When it comes to evaluations, however, the Gartner Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant doesn’t do as well. My concerns (which overlap) start:
- The Gartner MQ conflates many different use cases into one ranking (inevitable in this kind of work, but still regrettable).
- A number of the MQ vendor evaluations seem hard to defend. So do some of Gartner’s specific comments.
- Some of Gartner’s criteria seemingly amount to “parrots back our opinions to us”.
- As do I, Gartner thinks a vendor’s business and financial strength are important. But Gartner overdoes the matter, drilling down into picky issues it can’t hope to judge, such as assessing a vendor’s “ability to generate and develop leads.” *
- The 2012 Gartner Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant is closer to being a 1-dimensional ranking than 2-dimensional, in that entries are clustered along the line x=y. This suggests strong correlation among the results on various specific evaluation criteria.
| Categories: Data integration and middleware, Data warehousing, Database compression, Emulation, transparency, portability, Hadoop, Market share and customer counts, Oracle, Text | 5 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.
Some trends that will continue in 2013
I’m usually annoyed by lists of year-end predictions. Still, a reporter asked me for some, and I found one kind I was comfortable making.
Trends that I think will continue in 2013 include:
Growing attention to machine-generated data. Human-generated data grows at the rate business activity does, plus 0-25%. Machine-generated data grows at the rate of Moore’s Law, also plus 0-25%, which is a much higher total. In particular, the use of remote machine-generated data is becoming increasingly real.
Hadoop adoption. Everybody has the big bit bucket use case, largely because of machine-generated data. Even today’s technology is plenty good enough for that purpose, and hence justifies initial Hadoop adoption. Development of further Hadoop technology, which I post about frequently, is rapid. And so the Hadoop trend is very real.
Application SaaS. The on-premises application software industry has hopeless problems with product complexity and rigidity. Any suite new enough to cut the Gordian Knot is or will be SaaS (Software as a Service).
Newer BI interfaces. Advanced visualization — e.g. Tableau or QlikView — and mobile BI are both hot. So, more speculatively, are “social” BI (Business Intelligence) interfaces.
Price discounts. If you buy software at 50% of list price, you’re probably doing it wrong. Even 25% can be too high.
MySQL alternatives. NoSQL and NewSQL products often are developed as MySQL alternatives. Oracle has actually done a good job on MySQL technology, but now its business practices are scaring companies away from MySQL commitments, and newer short-request SQL DBMS are ready for use.