Continuent
Analysis of clustering technology vendor Continuent and its Tungsten product line. Related subjects include:
The Continuent Tungsten MySQL replication story
To the consternation of its then-CEO, I wrote very little about my then-client Continuent. However, when I knew Schooner’s recent announcement was coming, I reached out to other MySQL scale-out vendors too. I’ve already posted accordingly about CodeFutures (the dbShards guys) and ScaleBase. Now it’s late-responding Continuent’s turn.
Actually, what I’m mainly going to do is quote a very long email that Continuent’s current CEO/former CTO Robert Hodges sent me, and which I lightly edited. Read more
| Categories: Continuent, Data integration and middleware, dbShards and CodeFutures, MySQL, Open source, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology | 9 Comments |
Teradata, Xkoto Gridscale (RIP), and active-active clustering
Having gotten a number of questions about Teradata’s acquisition of Xkoto, I leaned on Teradata for an update, and eventually connected with Scott Gnau. Takeaways included:
- Teradata is discontinuing Xkoto’s existing product Gridscale, which Scott characterized as being too OLTP-focused to be a good fit for Teradata. Teradata hopes and expects that existing Xkoto Gridscale customers won’t renew maintenance. (I’m not sure that they’ll even get the option to do so.)
- The point of Teradata’s technology + engineers acquisition of Xkoto is to enhance Teradata’s active-active or multi-active data warehousing capabilities, which it has had in some form for several years.
- In particular, Teradata wants to tie together different products in the Teradata product line. (Note: Those typically all run pretty much the same Teradata database management software, except insofar as they might be on different releases.)
- Scott rattled off all the plausible areas of enhancement, with multiple phrasings – performance, manageability, ease of use, tools, features, etc.
- Teradata plans to have one or two releases based on Xkoto technology in 2011.
Frankly, I’m disappointed at the struggles of clustering efforts such as Xkoto Gridscale or Continuent’s pre-Tungsten products, but if the DBMS vendors meet the same needs themselves, that’s OK too.
The logic behind active-active database implementations actually seems pretty compelling: Read more
| Categories: Clustering, Continuent, Data warehousing, Solid-state memory, Teradata, Theory and architecture, Xkoto | 9 Comments |
Some NoSQL links
I plan to post a few things soon about MongoDB, Cassandra, and NoSQL in general. So I’m poking around a bit reading stuff on the subjects. Here are some links I found. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cassandra, Continuent, Google, MySQL, NoSQL, Open source, RDF and graphs, Tokutek and TokuDB | 5 Comments |
More miscellany
Adding to yesterday’s varied quick comments: Read more
| Categories: Continuent, Infobright, Rainstor, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Continuent on clustering
Robert Hodges, CTO of my client Continuent, put up a blog post laying out his and Continuent’s views on database clustering. Continuent offers Tungsten, its third try at database clustering technology, targeted at MySQL, PostgreSQL, and perhaps Oracle. Unlike Continuent’s more ambitious. second-generation product, Tungsten offers single-master replication, which in Robert’s view allows for great ease of deployment and administration (he likes the phrase “bone-simple”).
The downside to Continuent Tungsten ‘s stripped down architecture is that it doesn’t solve the most extreme performance scale-out problems. Instead, Continuent focuses on the other big benefits of keeping your data in more than one place, namely high availability and data loss prevention (i.e., backup).
Continuent has been around for a number of years, starting out in Finland but now being based in Silicon Valley. For most purposes, however, it’s reasonable to think of Continuent and Tungsten as start-up efforts.
As you might guess from the references to Finland and MySQL, Continuent’s products are open source, or at least have open source versions. I’m still a little fuzzy as to which features are open sourced and which are not. For that matter, I’m still unclear as to Tungsten’s feature list overall …
| Categories: Clustering, Continuent, MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | 3 Comments |