Infobright update
For the past couple of quarters, Infobright has been MySQL’s partner of choice for larger data warehousing applications. Infobright’s stated business metrics, and I quote, include:
> 50 Customers in 7 Countries
> 25 Partners on 4 continents
A vibrant open source community
+1 million visitors
Approaching 10,000 downloads
2,000 active community participants
These may be compared with analogous metrics Infobright offered in February.
Infobright has also made or promised a variety of technological enhancements. Ones that are either shipping now or promised soon include:
- Routing all SQL through the Infobright Knowledge Grid rather than the generic MySQL engine. I forgot to double-check whether this is truly all SQL or just most, e.g., whether such SQL 2003 OLAP extensions as MySQL supports are included.
- Being able to query all data even when a load is going on. Specifically, Infobright will do versioning rather than relying on the current table-level locking scheme.
- Getting certified for Sun OpenStorage, which brings flash memory goodness and an associated speed-up.
Infobright is also previewing what it calls SSA (Simplified Scalability Architecture), which it plans to ship late this year. The essence of Infobright SSA is scale-out beyond a single server. Data access will still be shared-everything. Infobright stresses that performance is generally not disk-bound and — which sounds odd — not affected by the size of the database. Hence it doesn’t see any reason for a shared-nothing configuration.
If ACID compliance is on the roadmap, I missed it. (Edit: See the comments below — Infobright now boasts ACID compliance.) I know of at least one case in which Sun/MySQL suggested using a combination of the Infobright and MyISAM engines for an update-heavy data warehousing environment, but that configuration isn’t going to give ACID compliance either.
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[…] to offer a MySQL storage engine for analytic database processing. Thus, Calpont will compete with Infobright, Kickfire, and perhaps […]
[…] Infobright is the most established of the rest. At the moment I’m not recommending it for most industrial-strength uses unless the user is particularly cash-constrained. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that changed soon. A cheap, fast, simple columnar analytic DBMS has a place in the world. […]
Hi Curt,
It was nice to talk with you last week. Our apologies for not updating you on ACID compliance. We have made a number of changes in this area and now pass ACID compliance, using the TPC-H tests as a guideline. As you suggest, we should have included that in the release and briefing.
Regarding SQL 2003 standard support, MySQL supports very few of these newer additions including even some from SQL-99. We would need to extend MySQL ourselves to add support and we haven’t seen a market demand yet to schedule the extra work.
Cheers
ACID stands for:
Atomicity
Consistency
Integrity
Durability
Please explain how Infobright accomplishes all of these tasks w/out any transactional logging that I’m aware of?
For instance, how can they claim to support the ‘I’ in acid w/out supporting FOREIGN KEY CONSTRAINTS and UNIQUE KEY CONSTRAINTS, which form the basis of integrity checking?
Since they don’t support the concept of transactions, how can I load into two tables atomically and ensure rows do not end up in either of the tables (ie, both loads are rolled back) if an error happens on either load? This is the ‘A’ in ACID.
I imagine that the ‘C’ and ‘D’ portions are handled well, at least in the case of the database crashing while loading a single table, since a column store has an easily identified HWM (high water mark) for the columns. I’m not sure how they can guarantee this across multiple tables w/out transactional logging which I’m not aware of.
[…] posted about Infobright, and included some company-supplied metrics. Most looked familiar from a post I did in April, but Infobright’s latest figure for # of paying customers seems to be “>60″, […]
[…] One thing free InfiniDB has that Infobright only offers in its Enterprise Edition is ACID-compliant Insert/Update/Delete. (Note: I wish people would stop saying that Infobright Enterprise Edition isn’t ACID-compliant, since that point was cleared up a while ago.) […]