Mid-range
Analysis of database management systems optimized for general-purpose or transactional use, but not the most demanding high-end transactional applications. Related subjects include:
Supporting evidence for the DBMS disruption story
As previously announced, I did a webcast this afternoon, discussing database diversity. The title of the talk was taken directly from a post – What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize — that argued mid-range DBMS are suitable for a broad variety of tasks. The overriding theme was a Clayton Christensen-style “disruption” narrative.
The sponsor was EnterpriseDB, which is fitting. While not the biggest DBMS industry disrupter in terms of revenue or visible impact (MySQL and Netezza say “Hi”), the Postgres family in general and EnterpriseDB in particular epitomize the disruption threat like nobody else, because of how broadly they substitute for market-leading database managers.
As I promised on the call, below is a post with links to further research backing up the points made. They’re numbered to match some of the presentation slides, which you can find at this link.
3. Much of the discussion of database diversity comes from a series of posts I coordinated with Mike Stonebraker.
4. At various times, starting on Slide 4, I made reference to datatype extensibility, a key feature of Oracle and DB2 – and a key advantage of Postgres over MySQL.
10. Capping off the database diversity discussion, Slide 10 mirrors this 11-point version of a data management software taxonomy.
13-14. I’ve posted many times about data warehousing DBMS and related technologies, including this overview of major analytic DBMS products, another recent overview of data warehouse specialty technologies, and an attempt to distinguish between data warehouse appliance myths and realities. Of particular interest for further research may be our sections on data warehouse appliances and columnar DBMS.
15. I do most of my posting about text search over on Text Technologies, specifically in the search category. Vendors I specifically mentioned as blending search with other kinds of data retrieval were Mark Logic and Attivio.
16. There’s a section here on native XML database management.
17. We also have a section on managing RDF and other graphical data models.
18. Ditto complex event/stream processing.
19. The only embeddable DBMS I’ve written much about recently is solidDB. And frankly, even in that case I’ve focused more on mid-tier caching uses, the now-canceled MySQL relationship, or general technology than I did specifically on embedded uses.
22-24. Back in February, 2007 I made what is probably still my clearest post explaining why I think market-leading DBMS vendors are in the process of getting disrupted
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL | Leave a Comment |
Webcast on database diversity Wednesday April 9 2 pm Eastern
Once or twice a year, EnterpriseDB sponsors a webcast for me. The last two were super well-attended. And most people stayed to the end, which is generally an encouraging sign!
The emphasis this time is on alternatives to the market-leading DBMS. I’ll highlight the advantages of both data warehousing specialists and general-purpose mid-range DBMS (naturally focusing on the latter, given who the sponsor is). The provocative title is taken from a January, 2008 post — What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize. If you read every word of this blog, there probably won’t be much new for you. 🙂 But I’d love to have you listen in and perhaps ask a question anyway!
You can register on EnterpriseDB’s webcast page, which also has an archived webcast I did for them in October, 2007.
| Categories: Database diversity, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range | 1 Comment |
EnterpriseDB unveils Postgres Plus
EnterpriseDB is making a series of moves and announcements. Highlights include:
- Renaming/repositioning the product as “Postgres Plus.” The free product is now Postgres Plus, while the version you pay EnterpriseDB for is now Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
- Repackaging the products, so that Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a strict superset of Postgres Plus.
- New features added to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
- Features newly migrated from Advanced Server down to Postgres Plus.
- A strategic investment by IBM.
- Stressing Postgres in EnterpriseDB marketing, and dropping the tag-line defining themselves as “the Oracle-compatible database company.”
So far as I can tell, most of the technical differences between Advanced Server and regular Postgres Plus lie in three areas: Read more
| Categories: Cache, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
IBM discontinues the solidDB MySQL engine
Last year, I thought that solidDB could at least potentially be an outstanding MySQL engine. But as per news posted on SourceForge last week, that’s not going to happen. At least, it’s not going to happen via any development efforts from IBM.
| Categories: IBM and DB2, Mid-range, MySQL, Open source, solidDB | 4 Comments |
Who EnterpriseDB sells to
I previously wrote that EnterpriseDB-on-Elastra has very little enterprise traction, drawing most of its interest instead from online businesses or ISVs. Having used that as a starting point in a recent chat with EnterpriseDB marketing chief Derek Rodner, I can now add that overall:
- EnterpriseDB reports good traction with ISVs. In particular, those that resell Oracle would like a cheaper alternative. Sometimes, they can port their code with no rewriting at all.
- Online businesses of various kinds also are a significant fraction of the customer base.
- EnterpriseDB has some true large-enterprise customers — Derek rattled off some household names — but this isn’t yet the heart of its business.
- EnterpriseDB has an increasing business teleselling to SMBs.
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range | Leave a Comment |
Mike Stonebraker’s DBMS taxonomy
In a response to my recent five-part series on DBMS diversity, Mike Stonebraker has proposed his own taxonomy of data management technologies over on Vertica’s Database Column blog. (Edit: Some good stuff disappeared when Vertica nuked that blog.)
- OLTP DBMSs focused on fast, reliable transaction processing
- Analytic/Data Warehouse DBMSs focused on efficient load and ad-hoc query performance
- Science DBMSs — after all MatLab does not scale to disk-sized arrays
- RDF stores focused on efficiently storing semi-structured data in this format
- XML stores focused on semi-structured data in this format
- Search engines — the big players all use proprietary engines in this area
- Stream Processing Engines focused on real-time StreamSQL
- “Lean and Mean,” less-than-a-database engines focused on doing a small number of things very well (embedded databases are probably in this category)
- MapReduce and Hadoop — after all Google has enough “throw weight” to define a category
He goes on to say that each will be architected differently, except that — as he already convinced me back in July — RDF will be well-managed by specialty data warehouse DBMS. Read more
| Categories: Data types, Database diversity, Michael Stonebraker, Mid-range, OLTP, RDF and graphs, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
Database management system choices — mid-range-relational
This is the fourth of a five-part series on database management system choices. For the first post in the series, please click here.
The other threat to the high-end relational DBMS vendors aims squarely at the heart of their business. It’s the mid-range relational database management systems, which are doing an ever-larger fraction of what their high-end cousins can. That said, different products do different things well. So if you’re not blindly paying up for the security of an all-things-to-all-people high-end DBMS, there are a number of factors you might want to consider.
| Categories: Database diversity, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, PostgreSQL, Theory and architecture | 3 Comments |
EnterpriseDB on Elastra, early stages
I finally caught up with Bob Zurek about EnterpriseDB’s foray into the Elastra cloud. Here are some highlights:
- There have been dozens of applicants for the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta program. As is usual in limited beta programs, EnterpriseDB is trying to sort out the ones who’ll make a big commitment from the tire-kickers.
- The main interest in EnterpriseDB/Elastra has come from ISVs, and secondarily from purely online businesses (e.g., SaaS vendors, web businesses, and a large MMO game vendor). There’s been a little interest from enterprises.
- Significant fractions of the EnterpriseDB/Elastra beta applications come from each of the Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL user communities. A few come from SQL Server. None come from DB2.
- Bob praised Elastra for its technology in clustering, starting/stopping instances, etc. He also said that EnterpriseDB had “educated” Elastra on EnterpriseDB internals and/or admin tools, to make the integration work.
- EnterpriseDB will start turning on a few beta Elastra customers any day now (i.e., it may well not take until March, the original target).
| Categories: Cloud computing, Elastra, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source | Leave a Comment |
PostgreSQL speeds up OLTP
The Register reports on PostgreSQL 8.3, and emphasizes OLTP speedups and reductions in administrative burden:
Among the changes, Heap Only Tuples (HOT) that may cut the maintenance overhead of frequently updated tables by up to 75 per cent, spread checkpoints and background writer autotuning to reduce the impact of check points on response times, and an asynchronous commit option that also speeds the response times of certain transactions.
I wonder how EnterpriseDB compares on these features.
Edit: Slashdot has discussion and links. And here’s a PostgreSQL feature matrix.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
EnterpriseDB joins Elastra in the Amazon cloud
When Elastra announced their service to host MySQL and PostgreSQL in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud, I immediately told my dear darling clients at EnterpriseDB they should do the same. Whereupon they told me it would happen soon. However, they neglected to tell me when it was actually announced. So I know no more than can be found in this Computerworld article.
But I’ll say this — it’s a very tempting option, both for new web-based applications or businesses, or simply as a development platform pending later redeployment.