PostgreSQL
Analysis of open source database management system PostgreSQL and other products in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Related subjects include:
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.
Notes on some basic database terminology
In a call Monday with a prominent company, I was told:
- Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and Vertica aren’t relational.
- Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and Vertica are all data warehouse appliances.
That, to put it mildly, is not accurate. So I shall try, yet again, to set the record straight.
In an industry where people often call a DBMS just a “database” — so that a database is something that manages a database! — one may wonder why I bother. Anyhow …
1. The products commonly known as Oracle, Exadata, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, Teradata, Sybase IQ, Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster, Infobright, SAND, ParAccel, Exasol, Kognitio et al. all either are or incorporate relational database management systems, aka RDBMS or relational DBMS.
2. In principle, there can be difficulties in judging whether or not a DBMS is “relational”. In practice, those difficulties don’t arise — yet. Every significant DBMS still falls into one of two categories:
- Relational:
- Was designed to do relational stuff* from the get-go, even if it now does other things too.
- Supports a lot of SQL.
- Non-relational:
- Was designed primarily to do non-relational things.*
- Doesn’t support all that much SQL.
*I expect the distinction to get more confusing soon, at which point I’ll adopt terms more precise than “relational things” and “relational stuff”.
3. There are two chief kinds of relational DBMS: Read more
Hadapt is moving forward
I’ve talked with my clients at Hadapt a couple of times recently. News highlights include:
- The Hadapt 1.0 product is going “Early Access” today.
- General availability of Hadapt 1.0 is targeted for an officially unspecified time frame, but it’s soon.
- Hadapt raised a nice round of venture capital.
- Hadapt added Sharmila Mulligan to the board.
- Dave Kellogg is in the picture too, albeit not as involved as Sharmila.
- Hadapt has moved the company to Cambridge, which is preferable to Yale environs for obvious reasons. (First location = space they’re borrowing from their investors at Bessemer.)
- Headcount is in the low teens, with a target of doubling fast.
The Hadapt product story hasn’t changed significantly from what it was before. Specific points I can add include: Read more
| Categories: Hadapt, Hadoop, MapReduce, PostgreSQL, SQL/Hadoop integration, Theory and architecture, Workload management | 6 Comments |
Hadapt update
I met with the Hadapt guys today. I think I can be a bit crisper than before in positioning Hadapt and its use cases, namely:
- Hadapt is additional software on a cluster that also runs fully functional Hadoop/HDFS. (Cloudera Hadoop more than straight-from-Apache Hadoop to date, but that’s not a requirement.)
- The cluster also runs a DBMS on every node, such as PostgreSQL or one of Infobright/Vectorwise.
- Hadapt’s software manages parallel SQL queries by distributing them to the DBMS living on each node. Hadapt says that the resulting query performance far outshines Hive’s.
- Hadapt further says that, by exploiting the partner DBMS, its SQL functionality outpaces Hive’s as well.
- Target Hadapt use cases are centered around keeping machine-generated or other poly-structured data in Hadoop, and extracting, enhancing, or otherwise deriving some of it to live in the relational store.
- In particular, Hadapt seems like an interesting choice when you want to use that relational data as you work on other data that’s still in HDFS, or if you want to keep using the relational data in other kinds of MapReduce jobs.
- That all fits well with my thoughts about the importance of derived data.
Other evolution from what I wrote about Hadapt a few months ago includes:
- Hadapt is in beta now.
- Hadapt has added adult supervision in the form of Philip Wickline, late of Endeca.
In other news, Hadapt is our newest client.
Hadapt (commercialized HadoopDB)
The HadoopDB company Hadapt is finally launching, based on the HadoopDB project, albeit with code rewritten from scratch. As you may recall, the core idea of HadoopDB is to put a DBMS on every node, and use MapReduce to talk to the whole database. The idea is to get the same SQL/MapReduce integration as you get if you use Hive, but with much better performance* and perhaps somewhat better SQL functionality.** Advantages vs. a DBMS-based analytic platform that includes MapReduce — e.g. Aster Data — are less clear. Read more
Notes, links, and comments January 20, 2011
I haven’t done a pure notes/links/comments post for a while. Let’s fix that now. (A bunch of saved-up links, however, did find their way into my recent privacy threats overview.)
First and foremost, the fourth annual New England Database Summit (nee “Day”) is next week, specifically Friday, January 28. As per my posts in previous years, I think well of the event, which has a friendly, gathering-of-the-clan flavor. Registration is free, but the organizers would prefer that you register online by the end of this week, if you would be so kind.
The two things potentially wrong with the New England Database Summit are parking and the rush hour drive home afterwards. I would listen with interest to any suggestions about dinner plans.
One thing I hope to figure out at the Summit or before is what the hell is going on on Vertica’s blog or, for that matter, at Vertica. The recent Mike Stonebraker post that spawned a lot of discussion and commentary has disappeared. Meanwhile, Vertica has had three consecutive heads of marketing leave the company since June, and I don’t know who to talk to there any more. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Investment research and trading, MongoDB, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL, Vertica Systems | 4 Comments |
dbShards — a lot like an MPP OLTP DBMS based on MySQL or PostgreSQL
I talked yesterday w/ Cory Isaacson, who runs CodeFutures, makers of dbShards. dbShards is a software layer that turns an ordinary DBMS (currently MySQL or PostgreSQL) into an MPP shared-nothing ACID-compliant OLTP DBMS. Technical highlights included: Read more
| Categories: dbShards and CodeFutures, Facebook, MySQL, OLTP, Parallelization, PostgreSQL | 3 Comments |
Stakeholder-facing analytics
There’s a point I keep making in speeches, and used to keep making in white papers, yet have almost never spelled out in this blog. Let me now (somewhat) correct the oversight.
Analytic technology isn’t only for you. It’s also for your customers, citizens, and other stakeholders.
I am not referring here to what is well understood to be an important, fast-growing activity — providing data and its analysis to customers as your primary or only business — nor to the related business of taking people’s data, crunching it for them, and giving them results. That combined sector — which I am pretty alone in aggregating into one and calling data mart outsourcing — is one of the top several vertical markets for a lot of the analytic DBMS vendors I write about. Rather, I’m talking about enterprises that gather data for some primary purpose, and have discovered that a good secondary use of the data is to reflect it back to stakeholders, often the same ones who provided or created it in the first place.
For now I’ll call this category stakeholder-facing analytics, as the shorter phrase “stakeholder analytics” would be ambiguous.* I first picked up the idea early this decade from Information Builders, for whom it had become something of a specialty. I’ve been asking analytics vendors for examples of stakeholder-facing analytics ever since, and a number have been able to comply. But the whole thing is in its early days even so; almost any sufficiently large enterprise should be more active in stakeholder-facing analytics than it currently is.
Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data mart outsourcing, Fox and MySpace, PostgreSQL | 4 Comments |
Notes on the evolution of OLTP database management systems
The past few years have seen a spate of startups in the analytic DBMS business. Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster Data and others are all reasonably prosperous, alongside older specialty product vendors Teradata and Sybase (the Sybase IQ part). OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) and general purpose DBMS startups, however, have not yet done as well, with such success as there has been (MySQL, Intersystems Cache’, solidDB’s exit, etc.) generally accruing to products that originated in the 20th Century.
Nonetheless, OLTP/general-purpose data management startup activity has recently picked up, targeting what I see as some very real opportunities and needs. So as a jumping-off point for further writing, I thought it might be interesting to collect a few observations about the market in one place. These include:
- Big-brand OLTP/general-purpose DBMS have more “stickiness” than analytic DBMS.
- By number, most of an enterprise’s OLTP/general-purpose databases are low-volume and low-value.
- Most interesting new OLTP/general-purpose data management products are either MySQL-based or NoSQL.
- It’s not yet clear whether MySQL will prevail over MySQL forks, or vice-versa, or whether they will co-exist.
- The era of silicon-centric relational DBMS is coming.
- The emphasis on scale-out and reducing the cost of joins spans the NoSQL and SQL-based worlds.
- Users’ instance on “free” could be a major problem for OLTP DBMS innovation.
I shall explain. Read more
Greenplum Single-Node Edition — sometimes free is a real cool price
Greenplum is announcing today that you can run Greenplum software on a single 8-core commodity server, free. First and foremost, that’s a strong statement that Greenplum wants enterprises to pay it for Greenplum’s parallelization/”private cloud” capabilities. Second, it may be an attractive gift to a variety of folks who want to extract insight from terabyte-scale databases of various kinds.
Greenplum Single-Node Edition:
- Is free of charge, although you can buy support.
- Has no restrictions on use, production or otherwise.
- Has no restrictions on database size.
- Is closed-source.
For those who want free, terabyte-scale data warehousing software, Greenplum Single-Node Edition may be quite appealing, considering that the main available alternatives are:
- General-purpose open-source DBMS, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL (lacking analytic DBMS performance and features)
- Infobright Community Edition (the other best choice – Infobright’s commercial sales success indicates the solidity of Infobright’s technology)
- Rough research-project code and other other questionable open source offerings
- Crippleware from other commercial analytic DBMS vendors (e.g., Teradata)
For example, comparing PostgreSQL-based Greenplum with PostgreSQL itself, Greenplum offers:
- The ability to scale out queries across all cores in your box (and no, pgpool is not a serious alternative)
- Storage alternatives such as columnar (I am told that EnterpriseDB recently stopped funding a project for a PostgreSQL columnar option)