DBMS plug-compatibility gaining steam
ANTs Software’s primary focus isn’t really even on DBMS any more. Even so, it just announced a deal to replace Informix in a large retail chain’s in-store systems. (In its 1990s heyday, Informix wound up running in-store systems at an impressive list of major retailers. Of course, Informix was long ago acquired by IBM.)
EnterpriseDB has probably passed ANTs in the DBMS plug-compability business. And taken together they’re still pretty small. Even so, plug-compatible DBMS replacement has to be taken seriously as a (possibly) emerging trend. Economically, it makes all the sense in the world.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
The database technology of Guild Wars
I have the enviable task of researching online game and virtual world technology. My first interview, quite naturally, was with the lead developers of a game I actually play – Guild Wars. The overview is in another post; that may provide context for this one, which focuses on the database technology. (I also did a short post just on the implications for Guild Wars players.) It also has a brief description of what Guild Wars is – namely, a MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Role-Playing Game) with the unusual feature that most of the game world is instanced rather than utterly shared.
First, some scope. ArenaNet (Guild Wars’ developer, now a subsidiary of NCsoft) runs Microsoft SQL Server, mainly Enterprise Edition, having just switched to 2005 4 months ago. They run 1500-2500 transactions/second all day, spiking up to 5000 in their busiest periods. They have no full-time DBA, and when the developers started this project they didn’t know SQL. They’ve only had one major SQL Server failure in the 2+ years the game has been running, and that was (like most of their bugs) a network driver problem more than an issue with the core system.
As for what’s going on — there are a few different kinds of database things that happen in an instanced MMORPG. Read more
Large DB2 data warehouses on Linux (and AIX)
I was consulting recently to a client that needs to build really big relational data warehouses, and also is attracted to native XML. Naturally, I suggested they consider DB2. They immediately shot back that they were Linux-based, and didn’t think DB2 ran (or ran well) on Linux. Since IBM often leads with AIX-based offerings in its marketing and customer success stories, that wasn’t a ridiculous opinion. On the other hand, it also was very far from what I believed.
So I fired some questions at IBM, Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, IBM and DB2 | Leave a Comment |
Transparent scalability
I’ve been a DBMS industry analyst, in one guise or another, since 1981. So by now I’ve witnessed a whole lot of claims and debates about scalability. And there’s one observation I’d like to call out.
What matters most isn’t what kind of capacity or throughput you can get with heroic efforts. Rather, what matters most is the capacity and throughput you get without any kind of special programming or database administraton.
Of course, when taken to extremes, that point could become silly. DBMS are used by professionals, and requiring a bit of care and tuning is par for the course. But if you have a choice between two systems that can get the job done for you, one of which requires you to perform unnatural acts and one doesn’t – go for the one that works straightforwardly. Your overall costs will wind up being much lower, and you’ll probably get a lot more useful work done. A system that has to strain even to meet known requirements will probably fail altogether at meeting the as-yet-unknown ones that are sure to arise down the road.
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| Categories: Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
StreamBase and Truviso
StreamBase is a decently-established startup, possibly the largest company in its area. Truviso, in the process of changing its name from Amalgamated Insight, has a dozen employees, one referenceable customer, and a product not yet in general availability. Both have ambitious plans for conquering the world, based on similar stories. And the stories make a considerable amount of sense.
Both companies’ core product is a memory-centric SQL engine designed to execute queries without ever writing data to disk. Of course, they both have persistence stories too — Truviso by being tightly integrated into open-source PostgreSQL, StreamBase more via “yeah, we can hand the data off to a conventional DBMS.” But the basic idea is to route data through a whole lot of different in-memory filters, to see what queries it satisfies, rather than executing many queries in sequence against disk-based data. Read more
| Categories: Memory-centric data management, PostgreSQL, StreamBase, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), Truviso | 8 Comments |
The FileMaker story
Unfortunately, the first draft of this post got eaten. I’m now trying again.
In response to its small but vocal constituency, I got myself briefed on the FileMaker story. My conclusion, in a nutshell, is that FileMaker sometimes is a good alternative to low-end use of a standard relational DBMS. If you do feel able to use more standard-style products, you often should, for all sorts of obvious flexibility and future-proofing reasons. But if you can’t, or if you’re really confident the project won’t grow past a certain level, the FileMaker class of products can be a very appealing alternative.
Make no mistake; FileMaker is very different from conventional DBMS/app dev tool combos (and that’s the right comparison, as it combines aspects of both product categories into one). Read more
| Categories: FileMaker, OLTP | 14 Comments |