Columnar database management
Analysis of products and issues in column-oriented database management systems. Related subjects include:
Using multiple data stores
I’m commonly asked to assess vendor claims of the kind:
- “Our system lets you do multiple kinds of processing against one database.”
- “Otherwise you’d need two or more data managers to get the job done, which would be a catastrophe of unthinkable proportion.”
So I thought it might be useful to quickly review some of the many ways organizations put multiple data stores to work. As usual, my bottom line is:
- The most extreme vendor marketing claims are false.
- There are many different choices that make sense in at least some use cases each.
Horses for courses
It’s now widely accepted that different data managers are better for different use cases, based on distinctions such as:
- Short-request vs. analytic.
- SQL vs. non-SQL (NoSQL or otherwise).
- Expensive/heavy-duty vs. cheap/easy-to-support.
Vendors are part of this consensus; already in 2005 I observed
For all practical purposes, there are no DBMS vendors left advocating single-server strategies.
Vendor agreement has become even stronger in the interim, as evidenced by Oracle/MySQL, IBM/Netezza, Oracle’s NoSQL dabblings, and various companies’ Hadoop offerings.
Multiple data stores for a single application
We commonly think of one data manager managing one or more databases, each in support of one or more applications. But the other way around works too; it’s normal for a single application to invoke multiple data stores. Indeed, all but the strictest relational bigots would likely agree: Read more
Introduction to CitusDB
One of my lesser-known clients is Citus Data, a largely Turkish company that is however headquartered in San Francisco. They make CitusDB, which puts a scale-out layer over a collection of fully-functional PostgreSQL nodes, much like Greenplum and Aster Data before it. However, in contrast to those and other Postgres-based analytic MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) DBMS:
- CitusDB does not permanently fork PostgreSQL; Citus Data has committed to always working with the latest PostgreSQL release, or at least with one that’s less than a year old.
- Citus Data never made the “fat head” mistake — if a join can’t be executed directly on the CitusDB data-storing nodes, it can’t be executed in CitusDB at all.
- CitusDB follows the modern best-practice of having many virtual nodes on each physical node. Default size of a virtual node is one gigabyte. Each virtual node is technically its own PostgreSQL table.*
- Citus Data has already introduced an open source column-store option for PostgreSQL, which CitusDB of course exploits.
*One benefit to this strategy, besides the usual elasticity and recovery stuff, is that while PostgreSQL may be single-core for any given query, a CitusDB query can use multiple cores by virtue of hitting multiple PostgreSQL tables on each node.
Citus has thrown a few things against the wall; for example, there are two versions of its product, one which involves HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and one of which doesn’t. But I think Citus’ focus will be scale-out PostgreSQL for at least the medium-term future. Citus does have actual customers, and they weren’t all PostgreSQL users previously. Still, the main hope — at least until the product is more built-out — is that existing PostgreSQL users will find CitusDB easy to adopt, in technology and price alike.
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
NoSQL vs. NewSQL vs. traditional RDBMS
I frequently am asked questions that boil down to:
- When should one use NoSQL?
- When should one use a new SQL product (NewSQL or otherwise)?
- When should one use a traditional RDBMS (most likely Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server)?
The details vary with context — e.g. sometimes MySQL is a traditional RDBMS and sometimes it is a new kid — but the general class of questions keeps coming. And that’s just for short-request use cases; similar questions for analytic systems arise even more often.
My general answers start:
- Sometimes something isn’t broken, and doesn’t need fixing.
- Sometimes something is broken, and still doesn’t need fixing. Legacy decisions that you now regret may not be worth the trouble to change.
- Sometimes — especially but not only at smaller enterprises — choices are made for you. If you operate on SaaS, plus perhaps some generic web hosting technology, the whole DBMS discussion may be moot.
In particular, migration away from legacy DBMS raises many issues: Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Couchbase, HBase, In-memory DBMS, Microsoft and SQL*Server, NewSQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Oracle, Parallelization, SAP AG | 18 Comments |
MemSQL 3.0
Memory-centric data management is confusing. And so I’m going to clarify a couple of things about MemSQL 3.0 even though I don’t yet have a lot of details.* They are:
- MemSQL has historically been an in-memory row store, which as of last year scales out.
- It turns out that the MemSQL row store actually has two table types. One is scaled out. The other — called “reference” — is replicated on every node.
- MemSQL has now added a third table type, which is columnar and which resides in flash memory.
- If you want to keep data in, for example, both the scale-out row store and the column store, you’d have to copy/replicate it within MemSQL. And if you wanted to access data from both versions at once (e.g. because different copies cover different time periods), you’d likely have to do a UNION or something like that.
*MemSQL’s first columnar offering sounds pretty basic; for example, there’s no columnar compression yet. (Edit: Oops, that’s not accurate. See comment below.) But at least they actually have one, which puts them ahead of many other row-based RDBMS vendors that come to mind.
And to hammer home the contrast:
- IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which all sell row-based DBMS meant to run on disk or other persistent storage, have added or will add columnar options that run in RAM.
- MemSQL, which sells a row-based DBMS that runs in RAM, has added a columnar option that runs in persistent solid-state storage.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Database compression, In-memory DBMS, MemSQL, Solid-state memory | 12 Comments |
Thoughts on in-memory columnar add-ons
Oracle announced its in-memory columnar option Sunday. As usual, I wasn’t briefed; still, I have some observations. For starters:
- Oracle, IBM (Edit: See the rebuttal comment below), and Microsoft are all doing something similar …
- … because it makes sense.
- The basic idea is to take the technology that manages indexes — which are basically columns+pointers — and massage it into an actual column store. However …
- … the devil is in the details. See, for example, my May post on IBM’s version, called BLU, outlining all the engineering IBM did around that feature.
- Notwithstanding certain merits of this approach, I don’t believe in complete alternatives to analytic RDBMS. The rise of analytic DBMS oriented toward multi-structured data just strengthens that point.
I’d also add that Larry Ellison’s pitch “build columns to avoid all that index messiness” sounds like 80% bunk. The physical overhead should be at least as bad, and the main saving in administrative overhead should be that, in effect, you’re indexing ALL columns rather than picking and choosing.
Anyhow, this technology should be viewed as applying to traditional business transaction data, much more than to — for example — web interaction logs, or other machine-generated data. My thoughts around that distinction start:
- I argued back in 2011 that traditional databases will wind up in RAM, basically because …
- … Moore’s Law will make it ever cheaper to store them there.
- Still, cheaper != cheap, so this is a technology only to use with your most valuable data — i.e., that transactional stuff.
- These are very tabular technologies, without much in the way of multi-structured data support.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, IBM and DB2, Memory-centric data management, Microsoft and SQL*Server, OLTP, Oracle, SAP AG, Workday | 6 Comments |
Things I keep needing to say
Some subjects just keep coming up. And so I keep saying things like:
Most generalizations about “Big Data” are false. “Big Data” is a horrific catch-all term, with many different meanings.
Most generalizations about Hadoop are false. Reasons include:
- Hadoop is a collection of disparate things, most particularly data storage and application execution systems.
- The transition from Hadoop 1 to Hadoop 2 will be drastic.
- For key aspects of Hadoop — especially file format and execution engine — there are or will be widely varied options.
Hadoop won’t soon replace relational data warehouses, if indeed it ever does. SQL-on-Hadoop is still very immature. And you can’t replace data warehouses unless you have the power of SQL.
Note: SQL isn’t the only way to provide “the power of SQL”, but alternative approaches are just as immature.
Most generalizations about NoSQL are false. Different NoSQL products are … different. It’s not even accurate to say that all NoSQL systems lack SQL interfaces. (For example, SQL-on-Hadoop often includes SQL-on-HBase.)
Hortonworks, Hadoop, Stinger and Hive
I chatted yesterday with the Hortonworks gang. The main subject was Hortonworks’ approach to SQL-on-Hadoop — commonly called Stinger — but at my request we cycled through a bunch of other topics as well. Company-specific notes include:
- Hortonworks founder J. Eric “Eric14” Baldeschwieler is no longer at Hortonworks, although I imagine he stays closely in touch. What he’s doing next is unspecified, except by the general phrase “his own thing”. (Derrick Harris has more on Eric’s departure.)
- John Kreisa still is at Hortonworks, just not as marketing VP. Think instead of partnerships and projects.
- ~250 employees.
- ~70-75 subscription customers.
Our deployment and use case discussions were a little confused, because a key part of Hortonworks’ strategy is to support and encourage the idea of combining use cases and workloads on a single cluster. But I did hear:
- 10ish nodes for a typical starting cluster.
- 100ish nodes for a typical “data lake” committed adoption.
- Teradata UDA (Unified Data Architecture)* customers sometimes (typically?) jumping straight to a data lake scenario.
- A few users in the 10s of 1000s of nodes. (Obviously Yahoo is one.)
- HBase used in >50% of installations.
- Hive probably even more than that.
- Hortonworks is seeing a fair amount of interest in Windows Hadoop deployments.
*By the way — Teradata seems serious about pushing the UDA as a core message.
Ecosystem notes, in Hortonworks’ perception, included:
- Cloudera is obviously Hortonworks’ biggest distro competitor. Next is IBM, presumably in its blue-forever installed base. MapR is barely on the radar screen; Pivotal’s likely rise hasn’t yet hit sales reports.
- Hortonworks evidently sees a lot of MicroStrategy and Tableau, and some Platfora and Datameer, the latter two at around the same level of interest.
- Accumulo is a big deal in the Federal government, and has gotten a few health care wins as well. Its success is all about security. (Note: That’s all consistent with what I hear elsewhere.)
I also asked specifically about OpenStack. Hortonworks is a member of the OpenStack project, contributes nontrivially to Swift and other subprojects, and sees Rackspace as an important partner. But despite all that, I think strong Hadoop/OpenStack integration is something for the indefinite future.
Hortonworks’ views about Hadoop 2.0 start from the premise that its goal is to support running a multitude of workloads on a single cluster. (See, for example, what I previously posted about Tez and YARN.) Timing notes for Hadoop 2.0 include:
- It’s been in preview/release candidate/commercial beta mode for weeks.
- Q3 is the goal; H2 is the emphatic goal.
- Yahoo’s been in production with YARN >8 months, and has no MapReduce 1 clusters left. (Yahoo has >35,000 Hadoop nodes.)
- The last months of delays have been mainly about sprucing up various APIs and protocols, which may need to serve for a similar multi-year period as Hadoop 1’s have. But there also was some YARN stabilization into May.
Frankly, I think Cloudera’s earlier and necessarily incremental Hadoop 2 rollout was a better choice than Hortonworks’ later big bang, even though the core-mission aspect of Hadoop 2.0 is what was least ready. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance, NameNode failover and so on were well worth having, and it’s more than a year between Cloudera starting supporting them and when Hortonworks is offering Hadoop 2.0.
Hortonworks’ approach to doing SQL-on-Hadoop can be summarized simply as “Make Hive into as good an analytic RDBMS as possible, all in open source”. Key elements include: Read more
Impala and Parquet
I visited Cloudera Friday for, among other things, a chat about Impala with Marcel Kornacker and colleagues. Highlights included:
- Impala is meant to someday be a competitive MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic RDBMS.
- At the moment, it is not one. For example, Impala lacks any meaningful form of workload management or query optimization.
- While Impala will run against any HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) file format, claims of strong performance assume that the data is in Parquet …
- … which is the replacement for the short-lived Trevni …
- … and which for most practical purposes is true columnar.
- Impala is also meant to be more than an RDBMS; Parquet and presumably in the future Impala can accommodate nested data structures.
- Just as Impala runs against most or all HDFS file formats, Parquet files can be used by most Hadoop execution engines, and of course by Pig and Hive.
- The Impala roadmap includes workload management, query optimization, data skipping, user-defined functions, hash distribution, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Data gets into Parquet via batch jobs only — one reason it’s important that Impala run against multiple file formats — but background format conversion is another roadmap item. A single table can be split across multiple formats — e.g., the freshest data could be in HBase, with the rest is in Parquet.
IBM BLU
I had a good chat with IBM about IBM BLU, aka BLU Accelerator or Acceleration. BLU basics start:
- BLU is a part of DB2.
- BLU works like a columnar analytic DBMS.
- If you want to do a join combining BLU and non-BLU tables, all the BLU tables are joined first, and the result set is joined to the other tables by the rest of DB2.
And yes — that means Oracle is now the only major relational DBMS vendor left without a true columnar story.
BLU’s maturity and scalability basics start:
- BLU is coming out in IBM DB2 10.5, this quarter.
- BLU will initially be single-server, but …
- … IBM claims “near-linear” scalability up to 64 cores, and further says that …
- … scale-out for BLU is coming “soon”.
- IBM already thinks all your analytically-oriented DB2 tables should be in BLU.
- IBM describes the first version of BLU as being optimized for 10 TB databases, but capable of handling 20 TB.
BLU technical highlights include: Read more