Mid-range

Analysis of database management systems optimized for general-purpose or transactional use, but not the most demanding high-end transactional applications. Related subjects include:

April 10, 2015

MariaDB and MaxScale

I chatted with the MariaDB folks on Tuesday. Let me start by noting:

The numbers around MariaDB are a little vague. I was given the figure that there were ~500 customers total, but I couldn’t figure out what they were customers for. Remote DBA services? MariaDB support subscriptions? Something else? I presume there are some customers in each category, but I don’t know the mix. Other notes on MariaDB the company are:

MariaDB, the company, also has an OEM business. Part of their pitch is licensing for connectors — specifically LGPL — that hopefully gets around some of the legal headaches for MySQL engine suppliers.

MaxScale is a proxy, which starts out by intercepting and parsing MariaDB queries. Read more

February 22, 2015

Data models

7-10 years ago, I repeatedly argued the viewpoints:

Since then, however:

So it’s probably best to revisit all that in a somewhat organized way.

Read more

July 14, 2014

21st Century DBMS success and failure

As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.

DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.

In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.

Buyer inertia is a greater concern.

A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.

Otherwise I’d say:  Read more

November 10, 2013

RDBMS and their bundle-mates

Relational DBMS used to be fairly straightforward product suites, which boiled down to:

Now, however, most RDBMS are sold as part of something bigger.

Read more

November 8, 2013

Comments on the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems

The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems is out. “Operational” seems to be Gartner’s term for what I call short-request, in each case the point being that OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) is a dubious term when systems omit strict consistency, and when even strictly consistent systems may lack full transactional semantics. As is usually the case with Gartner Magic Quadrants:

Anyhow:  Read more

July 25, 2012

SQL Server to MySQL migration — why?

Oracle wants you to help you migrate from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. I was asked for comment, and replied:

Am I missing anything?

January 24, 2012

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and enterprise database choices in general

Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on March 7. An IM chat with a reporter resulted, and went something like this.

Reporter: [Care to comment]?
CAM: SQL Server is an adequate product if you don’t mind being locked into the Microsoft stack. For example, the ColumnStore feature is very partial, given that it can’t be updated; but Oracle doesn’t have columnar storage at all.

Reporter: Is the lock-in overall worse than IBM DB2, Oracle?
CAM: Microsoft locks you into an operating system, so yes.

Reporter: Is this release something larger Oracle or IBM shops could consider as a lower-cost alternative a co-habitation scenario, in the event they’re mulling whether to buy more Oracle or IBM licenses?
CAM: If they have a strong Microsoft-stack investment already, sure. Otherwise, why?

Reporter: [How about] just cost?
CAM: DB2 works just as well to keep Oracle honest as SQL Server does, and without a major operating system commitment. For analytic databases you want an analytic DBMS or appliance anyway.

Best is to have one major vendor of OTLP/general-purpose DBMS, a web DBMS, a DBMS for disposable projects (that may be the same as one of the first two), plus however many different analytic data stores you need to get the job done.

By “web DBMS” I mean MySQL, NewSQL, or NoSQL. Actually, you might need more than one product in that area.

August 13, 2011

Couchbase business update

I decided I needed some Couchbase drilldown, on business and technology alike, so I had solid chats with both CEO Bob Wiederhold and Chief Architect Dustin Sallings. Pretty much everything I wrote at the time Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase (the company) still holds up. But I have more detail now. 😉

Context for any comments on customer traction includes:

That said,

Membase sales are concentrated in five kinds of internet-centric companies, which in declining order are: Read more

April 4, 2011

Some thoughts on Oracle Express Edition

I was asked by a press person about Oracle 11g Express Edition. So I might as well also share my thoughts here.

1.  Oracle 11g Express Edition is seriously crippled. E.g., it’s limited to 1 GB of RAM and 11 GB of data. However …

2.  … I recall when I excitedly uncovered the first 1 GB relational databases, the way I’ve uncovered petabyte-scale databases in recent years. It was less than 20 years ago. This illustrates that …

3. … the Oracle 11g Express Edition crippleware is better than what top relational database users had 20 years ago. That in turn suggests …

4.  … there are plenty of businesses small enough to use Oracle 11g Express Edition for real work today.

5.  Sensible reasons for having an Oracle Express Edition start with test, development, and evaluation. But there’s also market seeding — if somebody uses it for whatever reason, then either the person, the organization, or both could at some point go on to be a real Oracle customer.

By the way, allowable database size of 11 GB is up from 4 GB a few years ago. That’s like treading water. 🙂

July 17, 2010

Sybase SQL Anywhere

After Powersoft acquired Watcom and its famed Fortran compiler, marketing VP Tom Herring told me that the hidden jewel of the acquisition might well be a little DBMS, Watcom SQL. To put it mildly, Tom was right. Watcom SQL became SQL Anywhere; Powersoft was acquired by Sybase; Powersoft’s and Sybase’s main products both fell on hard times; Sybase built a whole mobile technology division around SQL Anywhere; and the whole thing just got sold for billions of dollars to SAP. Chris Kleisath recently briefed me on SQL Anywhere Version 12 (released to manufacturing this month), which seemed like a fine opportunity to catch up on prior developments as well.

The first two things to understand about SQL Anywhere is that there actually are three products:

and also that there are three main deployment/use cases:

Read more

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