The petabyte machine
EMC has announced a machine — a virtual tape library — that supposedly stores 1.8 petabytes of data. Even though that’s only 584 terabytes uncompressed, it shows that the 1 petabyte barrier will be broken soon no matter how unhyped the measurement.
I just recently encountered some old notes in which Sybase proudly announced a “1 gigabyte challenge.” The idea was that 1 gig was a breakthrough size for business databases.
| Categories: Database compression, EMC, Sybase, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
Whether or not to use MySQL
CIO Magazine has a pretty superficial back-and-forth about whether or not to use MySQL in enterprises. For example, one of the strongest claims in the pro-MySQL article is the not-so-staggering observation (italics theirs)
One way MySQL achieves this scalability is through a popular feature called stored procedures, mini, precompiled routines that reside outside of the application.
And the anti-MySQL article doesn’t have much in the way of crunchiness except for the fairly well-reasoned
Most of the required features for an RDBMS are firmly in place with the release of MySQL 5.0, but we can legitimately consider the maturity of some of these features as a possible reason to shy away from MySQL. For example, the lack of views, triggers and stored procedures has historically been the major criticism of MySQL. These have all been supported by MySQL for a year or so now, but by comparison, they have been features for about 10 years in most competing RDBMSes.
This article pair got Slashdotted, and some interesting byplay ensued. The general theme was along the lines of
“MySQL is terribly deficient out of the box.”
“Yes, but if you use this new, lightly-documented add-in, that specific problem is now solved.”
| Categories: Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP | 2 Comments |
Another short white paper on MPP data warehouse appliances
Following up on an earlier piece, DATAllegro has sponsored a second white paper on MPP data warehouse appliances. This one focuses specifically on DATAllegro’s move from Type 1 to Type 2 (i.e., virtual) appliances, via its new V3 product line. The basic tradeoffs of this move include:
- Superior hardware reliability
- Hardware lock-in shifted from DATAllegro to Dell, EMC, and Cisco
- Loss of specialized encryption acceleration
- Possibly a loss of some other performance optimization as well
- Better time-to-market in exploiting general Moore’s Law performance speedups
Actually, I didn’t make that last point explicitly in the paper, but it quite possibly trumps any performance disadvantages from the switch. And Moore’s Law itself certainly far outweighs any other performance-affecting factors.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro | Leave a Comment |
More academic hype about the Semantic Web
A major Semantic Web researcher has built a cluster that can do RDF queries, and hence can get subsecond response time on queries against a database of 7 billion three-column records, The Register obsequiously reports. Golly gee whiz wow.
“The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,” said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI.”
I actually think the Semantic Web contains some good ideas, but this kind of over-the-top breathlessness doesn’t seem to do anybody very much good.
| Categories: RDF and graphs | 3 Comments |
IBM’s mid-range OLTP offering gets strengthened
In the past, when I’ve asked Jeff Jones of IBM for permission to post one of his well-written notes, his response has pretty much been “Of course! Why did you bother asking?” So this time I’m just going ahead and skipping that step. The note is about IBM’s mid-range flavor of DB2, targeted directly at MySQL.
Today, IBM announced that its popular DB2 9 Express-C software is now available with an optional low-cost yearly support subscription. DB2 Express-C has been available without license charges for downloading, application development, deployment and redistribution since January 2006. It remains available without license charges for those that do not require support. Electronic general availability of the new support option is scheduled for June 1, 2007.
The new DB2 Express-C support option provides 24×7 product support, regular fixpacks and upgrade protection. In addition, this option provides support for high availability clustering, offsite disaster recovery, and data replication with remote data servers without additional charge.
Background
— Subscriptions are priced at $2,995 (U.S.) per server per year. This is identical to MySQL Enterprise Gold, but DB2 Express-C includes features not found in MySQL including pureXML support, high availability clustering (MySQL Cluster support costs extra), autonomic features, and no-charge administration and development tools. Unlike the free offerings from Microsoft and Oracle, DB2 Express-C does not place limits on the size or number of databases managed. With up to 4 GB of memory and up to 2 processors, DB2 Express-C can run on more powerful servers, can scale higher and can perform faster than its competitors. Read more
| Categories: IBM and DB2, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
You can now listen to and watch the midrange OLTP DBMS webinar
The replay of last Wednesday’s webinar is now available at this link. It will probably stay up for 3-6 months. There may also be a more persistent link to the audio part only, which I will supply if and when I get it.
The main subject was what kinds of features differentiate OLTP DBMS, and for what kinds of applications you should care about them. As an introduction I spelled out some of my thoughts on what kind of overall DBMS product portfolio enterprises should and do have.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP | Leave a Comment |