Emulation, transparency, portability
Analysis of products that support the emulation of market-leading database management systems. Related subjects include:
EnterpriseDB’s itemized claims of Oracle compatibility
Obviously, I’m poking around EnterpriseDB’s site this morning (in connection with their status as my client, actually). Anyhow, we all know that one of EnterpriseDB’s core claims is great Oracle-compatibility — but what exactly do they mean by that? I found a fairly clearly laid-out answer, as of last year, in this white paper and and — even more simply — in this blog post summarizing the white paper.
Oracle’s hefty price increases
Jeff Jones of IBM wrote in to point out that Oracle is slathering on the price increases. I quote: Read more
| Categories: Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Oracle | 5 Comments |
ANTs bails out of the DBMS market
ANTs Data Server — i.e., the ANTs DBMS — has been sold off to a company called 4Js. It is now to be called Genero DB. Actually, 4Js has been selling or working on a version of the product called Genero DB since 2006, specifically an Informix-compatible one.
I’m not totally clear on why an Informix-compatible DBMS is needed in a world that already has Informix SE, but maybe IBM is overcharging for maintenance even on the low-end version of the product.
Meanwhile, ANTs, which had originally tried to get enterprises to migrate away from Oracle, is now focused on middleware called the ANTs Compatibility Server to help them migrate to Oracle, specifically/initially from Sybase.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Emulation, transparency, portability, IBM and DB2, Oracle, Sybase | 2 Comments |
Database blades are not what they used to be
In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.
When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.
*A “Barney” announcement is one whose entire content boils down to “I love you; you love me.”
According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include:
| Categories: Data types, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source, PostgreSQL | 3 Comments |
EnterpriseDB unveils Postgres Plus
EnterpriseDB is making a series of moves and announcements. Highlights include:
- Renaming/repositioning the product as “Postgres Plus.” The free product is now Postgres Plus, while the version you pay EnterpriseDB for is now Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
- Repackaging the products, so that Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a strict superset of Postgres Plus.
- New features added to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
- Features newly migrated from Advanced Server down to Postgres Plus.
- A strategic investment by IBM.
- Stressing Postgres in EnterpriseDB marketing, and dropping the tag-line defining themselves as “the Oracle-compatible database company.”
So far as I can tell, most of the technical differences between Advanced Server and regular Postgres Plus lie in three areas: Read more
| Categories: Cache, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
Dataupia catch-up
I had a catch-up phone meeting with Dataupia, since I hadn’t spoke with the company since the middle of last year. Like several other companies in the data warehouse specialist market, Dataupia can be annoyingly secretive. On the plus side – and this is very refreshing — Dataupia doesn’t seem to expect credit for accomplishments beyond those they’re willing to provide actual evidence for.
What I’ve gleaned about Dataupia’s customer activity to date amounts to: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | Leave a Comment |
Who EnterpriseDB sells to
I previously wrote that EnterpriseDB-on-Elastra has very little enterprise traction, drawing most of its interest instead from online businesses or ISVs. Having used that as a starting point in a recent chat with EnterpriseDB marketing chief Derek Rodner, I can now add that overall:
- EnterpriseDB reports good traction with ISVs. In particular, those that resell Oracle would like a cheaper alternative. Sometimes, they can port their code with no rewriting at all.
- Online businesses of various kinds also are a significant fraction of the customer base.
- EnterpriseDB has some true large-enterprise customers — Derek rattled off some household names — but this isn’t yet the heart of its business.
- EnterpriseDB has an increasing business teleselling to SMBs.
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range | Leave a Comment |
ParAccel technical highlights
I recently caught up with ParAccel’s CTO Barry Zane and Marketing VP Kim Stanick for a long technical discussion, which they have graciously continued by email. It would be impolitic in the extreme to comment on what led up to that. Let’s just note that many things I’ve previously written about ParAccel are now inoperative, and go straight to the highlights.
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability, Microsoft and SQL*Server, ParAccel | 4 Comments |
Just what does Oracle-compatibility mean?
Quite a bit of DBMS plug-compatibility is being claimed these days. Lewis Cunningham’s post on a few new EnterpriseDB features illustrates just how picky compatibility features can get. One can run Oracle code but not get around to handling comments properly? Sheesh.
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Oracle | Leave a Comment |
ParAccel opens the kimono slightly
Please do not rely on the parts of this post that draw a distinction between in-memory and disk-based operation. See our February 18, 2008 post about ParAccel instead. It turns out that communication with ParAccel was yet worse than I had realized.
Officially launched today at the TDWI conference, ParAccel is out to compete with Netezza. Right out of the chute, ParAccel may have surpassed Netezza in at least one area: pointlessly annoying secrecy. (In other regards I love them dearly, but that paranoia can be a real pain.) As best I can remember, here are some things about ParAccel that I both am allowed to say and find interesting:
- ParAccel offers a columnar, MPP data warehouse DBMS, called the ParAccel Analytic Database.
- ParAccel’s product runs in two main modes. “Maverick” is normal, stand-alone mode. “Amigo” mode amounts to a plug-compatible accelerator for Oracle or Microsoft SQL*Server. Early sales and marketing were concentrated on SQL*Server Amigo mode.
- ParAccel’s product also runs in another pair of modes – in-memory and disk-based. Early sales and marketing were concentrated on in-memory mode. Hybrid memory-centric processing sounds like something for a future release.
- Sun has a reseller partnership with ParAccel, focused on in-memory mode.
- Sun and ParAccel published record-shattering 100 gigabyte, 300 gigabyte, and 1 terabyte TPC-H benchmarks today, based on in-memory mode. (If you’d like to throw 13 terabytes of disk at 1 terabyte of user data, running simple and repetitive queries, that benchmark might be a useful guide to your own experience. But hey – that’s a big improvement on the prior champion, who used 40 terabytes of disk. To ParAccel’s credit, they’re not pretending that this is a bigger deal than it is.)
Webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS Tuesday October 23 12 noon Eastern time
I’m doing another webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS next Tuesday, at 12 noon Eastern. It’s sponsored by EnterpriseDB, who also sponsored one six months ago on the same subject. Hopefully, this one will be a bit fresher. Sign up today! The expected turnout is humongous.
Technorati Tags: EnterpriseDB, OLTP, database management system
| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
Three ways Oracle or Microsoft could go MPP
I’ve been arguing for a while that Oracle and Microsoft are screwed in high-end data warehousing. The reason is that they’re stuck with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) architectures, while Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, and many others enjoy the benefits of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing). Thus, Teradata and DATAllegro boast installations in the hundreds of terabytes each, while Oracle and Microsoft users usually have to perform unnatural acts of hard-coded partitioning even to reach the 10 terabyte level.
That said, there are at least three ways Oracle and/or Microsoft could get out of this technical box:
1. They could buy or just partner with MPP vendors such as Dataupia, who offer plug-compatibility with their respective main DBMS.
2. They could buy whoever they want, plug-compatibility be damned. Presumably, they’d quickly add a light-weight data federation front-end to give the appearance of integration, then merge the products more closely over time.
3. They could develop or buy technology like DATAllegro’s, which essentially federates instances of an ordinary SMP DBMS across nodes of an MPP grid (Greenplum does something similar). I imagine that, for example, ripping Ingres out of DATAllegro and slotting in Oracle instead would be a pretty straightforward exercise; even without dramatic change to any of the optimizations, the resulting port would be something that ran pretty quickly on Day 1.
Bottom line: Oracle and Microsoft are hemorrhaging at the data warehouse high end now. But there are ways they could stanch the bleeding.
Calpont finally has a multipage website
Calpont’s website is finally more or less real. It still doesn’t say much except that the company is in alpha test with a Type II appliance, and that the product has a columnar DBMS architecture and Oracle transparency (with DB2) promised. Oh yes; it has 32 employees. The “Customer” tab doesn’t list any customers, but I guess they saved site design money by having it all ready to go when that situation changes.
Philip Howard’s recent article has a lot more meat than that, including the perplexing bit of info that Calpont is starting out with a shared-everything architecture. Based on that, as well as the company’s prior technical efforts, we can probably conclude they’re focused on rather small warehouses.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability | Leave a Comment |
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10
Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.
Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.
There also are some big performance boosts. Read more
Philip Howard likes Calpont — again
The ratio of Philip Howard plaudits about Calpont to shipping products from Calpont has now doubled. Yet it also has remained the same. This is because it is a countably infinite number, namely a quotient whose denominator is zero. Last time around, he seemed to like their hardware strategy. This time around, he seems to like their lack of a hardware strategy. Be that as it may, the previously discussed nature of Calpont’s website hasn’t changed — one page, content-free, and misleading even so.
Oh, and it appears he broke the embargo on Paraccel. Bad Philip. Spank him, Kim.
| Categories: Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability | 1 Comment |
An era of easier database portability?
More and more, I find myself addressing questions of database portability and transparency, most particularly in the cases of EnterpriseDB, Ants Software, and now also Dataupia. None of those three efforts is very large yet, but so far I’d rate their respective buzzes to be very encouraging in the case of EnterpriseDB, non-discouraging or better in the case of Ants, and too early to judge for Dataupia. On the whole, it definitely seems like a matter worthy of attention.
With that as backdrop, where is all this compatibility/portability/transparency stuff going to lead? Read more
| Categories: ANTs Software, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect | Leave a Comment |
Dataupia – low-end data warehouse appliances
It’s unfortunate that Dataupia has concepts like “Utopia” and “Satori” in its marketing, as those serve to obscure what the company really offers – data warehouse appliances designed for the market’s low end. Indeed, it seems that they’re currently very low-end, because they were just rolled out in May and are correspondingly immature.
Basic aspects include:
- Type 1 appliances, which most other data warehouse appliance vendors (Teradata excepted) have moved away from. And there actually seems to be very little special about the hardware design to take advantage of the proprietary opportunity.
- Apparently limited redistribution of intermediate query result sets – i.e, the “fat head” architecture most competitors have moved away from. But it’s not pure fat-head; there’s some data redistribution.
- General lack of partnerships with the obvious software players (but they’re working on that).
- Low price point ($19,500 per 2-terabyte module).
Beyond price, Dataupia’s one big positive differentiation vs. alternative products is that you don’t write SQL directly to a Dataupia appliance. Rather, you talk to it through the federation capability in your big-brand DBMS, such as Oracle or SQL*Server. Benefits of this approach include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 1 Comment |
EnterpriseDB has a huge partisan in FTD
The Register has a rip-roaring story on a (currently partial) conversion from Oracle to EnterpriseDB. Basically, FTD is royally pissed-off at Oracle, and EnterpriseDB stepped in with a very fast conversion.
Apparently, FTD decided they needed to Do Something after a Valentine’s Day meltdown, and the project was completed on EnterpriseDB in time for Mother’s Day.
One note of caution: When a user supports a vendor’s marketing this emphatically, it usually has gotten nice breaks on price and/or service. Your mileage may vary. On the other hand, EnterpriseDB is still a small enough company that, if you want them to love you to death, you can be pretty well assured that you’re important enough to them that they’ll do so.
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| Categories: Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Oracle | 2 Comments |
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.
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| Categories: ANTs Software, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
The big ANTs secret is officially out
ANTs has now put out a press release saying what was already obvious — the company is offering middleware to run applications written for one DBMS over another backend instead. The ANTs folks fondly think their own engine is just as good as anybody else’s, but realistically customers prefer name-brand DBMS for persistent storage, so that’s what they’re offering.
Read more
EnterpriseDB tries PostgreSQL-based Oracle plug-compatibility
Like Greenplum, EnterpriseDB is a PostgreSQL-based DBMS vendor with an interesting story, whose technical merits I don’t yet know enough to judge. In particular, CEO Andy Astor:
- Confirms that EnterpriseDB is OLTP-focused, unlike Greenplum. That said, they are also used for some reporting and so on. But they don’t run 10s-of-terabytes sized data marts.
- Claims EnterpriseDB has a high level of Oracle compatibility – SQL, datatypes, stored procedures (so that would be PL/SQL too), packages, functions, etc.
- Claims ANTs isn’t nearly as Oracle-compatible.
- Claims 50-100% better OLTP performance out of the box than vanilla PostgreSQL, due to auto-tuning.
Also, EnterpriseDB has added a bunch of tools to PostgreSQL – debugging, DBA, etc. And it provides actual-company customer support, something that seems desirable when using a DBMS. It should also be noted that the product is definitely closed-source, notwithstanding EnterpriseDB’s open-source-like business model and its close ties to the open source community.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL | Leave a Comment |
EnterpriseDB’s Oracle clone — fact or fiction?
PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB is attracting a bit of attention. Philip Howard, as he does of most products, takes a favorable view. Seth Grimes regards the company as dirty, rotten liars. The company suggests that Everquest gameplay* runs on an RDBMS. I find this inherently implausible, and hence am starting out with a skeptical view of the company’s marketing messages.
*As in character movement. The idea that character inventory is stored in an RDBMS I find vastly more credible. Ditto other less volatile aspects of character state.
