January 5, 2013

NewSQL thoughts

I plan to write about several NewSQL vendors soon, but first here’s an overview post. Like “NoSQL”, the term “NewSQL” has an identifiable, recent coiner — Matt Aslett in 2011 — yet a somewhat fluid meaning. Wikipedia suggests that NewSQL comprises three things:

I think that’s a pretty good working definition, and will likely remain one unless or until:

To date, NewSQL adoption has been limited.

That said, the problem may lie more on the supply side than in demand. Developing a competitive SQL DBMS turns out to be harder than developing something in the NoSQL state of the art.

*Revenue might be a different matter.

The main reasons for NewSQL adoption tend to fall in the areas of performance, scaling, manageability and cost. But while they all support SQL, some NewSQL DBMS have differentiated programming models even so.

Also, the MySQL add-ons and lookalikes vary in the (in)completeness of their MySQL emulation or support.

The most common performance/scaling NewSQL claims are simply “We scale, giving you the power of multiple servers, with sufficiently little downside in the way of tradeoffs.” That story is central to Clustrix, VoltDB, ScaleDB, NuoDB, and to anybody active in transparent sharding. Other performance/scaling claims include but are not limited to:

Management claims include (from multiple NewSQL vendors in each case):

And that’s about as much as I’m ready to generalize about the NewSQL sector. Posts about particular product and companies are on the way.

Comments

19 Responses to “NewSQL thoughts”

  1. Peter O'Kelly on January 5th, 2013 3:07 pm

    Thanks for the insights. Reference to “NoSQL” in the last sentence of the first paragraph should be “NewSQL,” however.

  2. Curt Monash on January 5th, 2013 3:25 pm

    Thanks! Fixed (in two places).

  3. Sean Merritt on January 6th, 2013 4:06 pm

    FoundationDB? ACID, OLTP, Key-Value. Calling themselves NoSQL but they seem to be NewSQL.
    http://foundationdb.com/

  4. Curt Monash on January 7th, 2013 12:43 am

    Well, FoundationDB has never reached out to me, and I don’t know much about them. But based on their website, they don’t seem to support SQL or a SQL-like DML.

    The point of SQL vs. NoSQL is that you can normalize (even slightly) and do joins.

  5. Introduction to GenieDB | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on January 7th, 2013 1:36 pm

    […] is one of the newer and smaller NewSQL companies. GenieDB’s story is focused on wide-area replication and uptime, coupled to claims […]

  6. Ori Herrnstadt on January 7th, 2013 6:33 pm

    Curt, SQL-oriented and NoSQL-oriented systems are starting to blur. There’s a movement towards databases that natively store data in a hierarchy (aka “nested data”) allowing for a combination of document like structures with SQL. Google Dremel, Apache Drill, Google F1 and (our own) Akiban are some examples. All reconsider the basic premise that a SQL capable database is required to have the concept of tables in its physical implementation.

  7. Introduction to NuoDB | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on January 12th, 2013 6:07 pm

    […] has an interesting NewSQL story. NuoDB’s core design goals seem to […]

  8. Tokutek update | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on January 15th, 2013 3:38 am

    […] that I’ve addressed some new NewSQL entrants, namely NuoDB and GenieDB, it’s time to circle back to some more established ones. […]

  9. A Journey From SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL - Cloud Gazette | Cloud Gazette on January 16th, 2013 2:01 pm

    […] of convergence. As a Big Data enthusiast I love this energy. Curt Monash has started his year blogging about NewSQL. I have blogged about a couple of NewSQL vendors, NimbusDB (NuoDB) and GenieDB, in the past […]

  10. A Journey From SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL on January 16th, 2013 4:59 pm

    […] of convergence. As a Big Data enthusiast I love this energy. Curt Monash has started his year blogging about NewSQL. I have blogged about a couple of NewSQL vendors, NimbusDB (NuoDB) and GenieDB, in the past and I […]

  11. Datacenter Acceleration - John W. Verity - Another Entrant in the NewSQL Stakes on January 17th, 2013 2:07 am

    […] guru Curt Monash includes in the NewSQL club suppliers such as (in no particular order) Akiban, GenieDB, Tokutek, CodeFutures, Clustrix, […]

  12. Attack of the Frankenschemas | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on January 28th, 2013 9:04 am

    […] further say that NoSQL is cheaper, scales better, is cooler or whatever, but given the range of NewSQL alternatives, those claims are often […]

  13. clieu on January 28th, 2013 10:51 am

    Is Schooner dead? I just get 404 errors now on their website…

  14. Curt Monash on January 28th, 2013 11:37 am

    Schooner was taken out by SanDisk. Unconfirmed rumor has it that the product is not being continued in its current form. Jerry Rudisin hasn’t gotten around yet to giving me the real scoop. 🙂

  15. newsql | Olipa kerran Bigdata on April 3rd, 2013 1:41 am

    […] Artikkelissa d Jaa:TwitterFacebookGoogle +1TulostaTykkää tästä:Tykkää Lataa… Bookmark the permalink. Jätä kommentti […]

  16. Introduction to Deep Information Sciences and DeepDB | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on April 17th, 2013 1:28 pm

    […] most other NewSQL and NoSQL DBMS, DeepDB is append-only, and hence could be said to “stream” data to […]

  17. John on May 29th, 2013 3:25 pm

    Great post Curt!!. Will appreciate your views on sqrrl. Seem to have some very interesting features for enterprise and works on Hadoop.

  18. Shane K Johnson on March 6th, 2014 7:56 pm

    I’d say that NewSQL is still maturing. They had to make trade-offs just like the first NoSQL databases did. It will be interesting to see what happens when they no longer have to make these trade-offs.

  19. Some notes on new-era data management, March 31, 2013 | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on March 28th, 2014 4:13 am

    […] in NoSQL/NewSQL short-request processing performance claims seem particularly confused. Reasons include but are not […]

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