Open source

Discussion of relational database management systems that are offered through some version of open source licensing. Related subjects include:

June 17, 2009

Apparent turmoil at EnterpriseDB

EnterpriseDB seems to be facing a string of management departures:

And by the way, EnterpriseDB, which used to call itself “the Oracle-compatible database company,” recently licensed out what used to be its core differentiating technology.

Now, this isn’t all bad news. EnterpriseDB’s Oracle-compatibility focus had to be changed anyway. And Fred Holahan was the proximate cause for me writing:

my recent dealings with EnterpriseDB underscore the importance of being VERY careful about counting your fingers after you shake hands with that company,

Still, these aren’t exactly indicators of a company executing on a smooth-running plan.

June 7, 2009

Daniel Abadi on Kickfire and related subjects

Daniel Abadi has a new blog, whose first post centers around Kickfire.  The money quote is (emphasis mine):

In order for me to get excited about Kickfire, I have to ignore Mike Stonebraker’s voice in my head telling me that DBMS hardware companies have been launched many times in the past are ALWAYS fail (the main reasoning is that Moore’s law allows for commodity hardware to catch up in performance, eventually making the proprietary hardware overpriced and irrelevant). But given that Moore’s law is transforming into increased parallelism rather than increased raw speed, maybe hardware DBMS companies can succeed now where they have failed in the past

Good point.

More generally, Abadi speculates about the market for MySQL-compatible data warehousing.  My responses include:

Anyhow, as previously noted, I’m a big Daniel Abadi fan. I look forward to seeing what else he posts in his blog, and am optimistic he’ll live up to or exceed its stated goals.

May 22, 2009

Yet more on MySQL forks and storage engines

The issue of MySQL forks and their possible effect on closed-source storage engine vendors continues to get attention.  The underlying question is:

Suppose Oracle wants to make life difficult for third-party storage engine vendors via its incipient control of MySQL?  Can the storage engine vendors insulate themselves from this risk by working with a MySQL fork?

Read more

May 15, 2009

MySQL forking heats up, but not yet to the benefit of non-GPLed storage engine vendors

Last month, I wrote “This is a REALLY good time to actively strengthen the MySQL forkers,” largely on behalf of closed-source/dual-source MySQL storage engine vendors such as Infobright, Kickfire, Calpont, Tokutek, or ScaleDB. Yesterday, two of my three candidates to lead the effort — namely Monty Widenius/MariaDB/Monty Program AB and Percona — came together to form something called the Open Database Alliance.  Details may be found:

But there’s no joy for the non-GPLed MySQL storage engine vendors in the early news. Read more

April 22, 2009

MySQL miscellany

For a guy who doesn’t go to the MySQL conference and routinely gets flamed by the MySQL community for being insufficiently adoring of their beloved product, I sure have been putting up a lot of MySQL-related posts recently. Here’s another, zooming through a few different topics. Read more

April 21, 2009

I don’t see why the GPL would be a major barrier to a useful MySQL fork

I posted suggesting that substantial elements of the MySQL community should throw their weight behind MySQL forks. Mike Olson of Cloudera helpfully pointed out, on Twitter and by email, how the GPL could appear to stand in the way of such an effort. But would it really?

Currently, any version of the MySQL code that isn’t proprietary to the MySQL company — which is owned by Sun and hence expected to be owned soon by Oracle — is covered by GPL 2. That license states (emphasis mine):

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted,

Hence it is hard for me to see how the MySQL company could in any way hinder another software vendor from saying “Please buy my software, then go download a free copy of GPLed MySQL and run the two together.”*

Read more

April 20, 2009

This week is a REALLY good time to actively strengthen the MySQL forkers

As my first three posts on the Oracle/Sun merger suggested, I think Oracle will do a better job with MySQL product development than Sun has.  But of course that’s a low hurdle.  And so it leaves open the questions:

What should and/or will be the most widely adopted code lines of MySQL (or other open source DBMS),

especially for the types of users and vendors who are engaged with MySQL (as opposed to principal alternative PostgreSQL) today?

As much as I’ve bashed MySQL/MyISAM and MySQL/InnoDB for being low-quality general-purpose DBMS, I’d still hate to see MySQL-based development stall out. There are a number of MySQL engine providers with rather unique technology, that deserve a good front-end partner to build their products with.  The high-volume sharding guys deserve the chance to continue down their current path as well.  And so does the low-end mass market — although I’m least worried about them, as I can’t imagine any realistic scenario in which Oracle doesn’t offer a version of MySQL fully suited to support 10s of millions of WordPress and Joomla installations.

So far as I can tell, there are only four real and currently active candidates for MySQL code coordinator:

Patrick Galbraith and Steven Vaughan-Nichols did good jobs of illustrating the turmoil.

Oracle isn’t a very comfortable partner long term for the storage engine vendors, and Drizzle doesn’t seem to be what they need. So I think that Infobright, Kickfire, Tokutek, Calpont, et al. need to get aligned in a hurry with an outside MySQL provider such as Percona or MariaDB or a newcomer, preferably all with the same one.  Yes, I understand that Infobright is getting a lot of marketing help from Sun these days, that Kickfire just got a nice-sounding Sun marketing announcement as well, and so on. But the time to start working toward the inevitable future is now.

And by “now” I mean “right now,” since the MySQL community is at this moment gathered together for its annual conference.

April 20, 2009

MySQL storage engine round-up, with Oracle-related thoughts

Here’s what I know about MySQL storage engines, more or less.

April 20, 2009

Should the Oracle/MySQL combo face antitrust opposition?

Oracle is a powerhouse in database management systems, but it’s hardly a monopolist. IBM revels in contriving figures that show it to have market share comparable to Oracle’s, and Microsoft has a very solid position as well.  Smaller players like Teradata, Sybase, and MySQL are also thriving. And of course there’s a whole wave of newer DBMS companies, from Netezza on, showing that the DBMS industry isn’t even the secure oligopoly it appeared to be earlier this decade.

However, it’s certainly legitimate to define a product category of “real” DBMS that includes everything from MySQL on up, but not Microsoft Access and other low-end data management products.  In that universe, while MySQL is a trivial addition to Oracle’s revenue, it’s a huge increment to Oracle’s unit market share.  A merged Oracle/MySQL will dwarf the competition in ways that Oracle or MySQL alone don’t.  Read more

April 20, 2009

First thoughts on Oracle acquiring Sun

More later.  I have a radio interview in a few minutes on a very different subject.

April 20, 2009

Calpont update — you read it here first!

Calpont has gone through a lot of strategy iterations since its founding. The super-short version is that Calpont originally planned an appliance built around a SQL chip, much like Kickfire. But after various changes in management and venture backing, Calpont turned itself into a software-only analytic DBMS vendor relying on a MySQL front end. Calpont is now at the stage of announcing an Early Adopter program at the MySQL conference on Wednesday, although details of Calpont’s product release timing, pricing, feature set, etc. are all To Be Determined.

Minor highlights of the Calpont technical story include:

Read more

April 20, 2009

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:

Read more

April 2, 2009

Ingres update

I talked with Ingres today. Much of the call was fluff — open-source rah-rah, plus some numbers showing purported success, but so finely parsed as to be pretty meaningless. (To Ingres’ credit, they did offer to let me talk w/ their CFO, even if they offered no promises as to whether he’d offer any more substantive information.) Highlights included:

Read more

March 25, 2009

Kickfire update

I talked recently with my clients at Kickfire, especially newish CEO Bruce Armstrong. I also visited the Kickfire blog, which among other virtues features a fairly clear overview of Kickfire technology. (I did my own Kickfire overview in October.) Highlights of the current Kickfire story include:

March 21, 2009

Why should anybody worry about Oracle’s tweaks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Internet News offers an overview of how Oracle’s own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux does or doesn’t different from generic RHEL. The defining example appears to be an alternate file system that Oracle finds useful, but Red Hat doesn’t want to bother offering. (Oracle says it donates all extensions back to the community, putting the onus on the community whether or not to use them in Linux versions other than Oracle’s.) The question is:

Does this count as an Oracle fork of (Red Hat Enterprise) Linux or doesn’t it?

My answer is:

Who cares? Read more

March 18, 2009

Database implications if IBM acquires Sun

Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion today (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry.

Read more

February 12, 2009

Infobright update

Infobright briefed me, and I thought it would be best to invite them to provide a write-up themselves of what customer and other information they did and didn’t want to disclose, for me to publish. Read more

February 4, 2009

Draft slides on how to select an analytic DBMS

I need to finalize an already-too-long slide deck on how to select an analytic DBMS by late Thursday night.  Anybody see something I’m overlooking, or just plain got wrong?

Edit: The slides have now been finalized.

November 21, 2008

High-end MySQL use

To a large extent, MySQL lives in two different alternate universes from most other DBMS. One is for low-end, simple database applications. For example, of all the DBMS I write about, MySQL is the one I actually use in my own business — because MySQL sits underneath WordPress, and WordPress is what runs my blogs. My largest database (the one for DBMS2) contains 12 megabytes of data in 11 tables, none of which has yet reached 5000 rows in size. Read more

September 15, 2008

Infobright update

In connection with the announcements that:

I got my first real Infobright update since January. Highlights included:

Read more

September 15, 2008

Infobright’s open source move has a lot of potential

Infobright announced today that it’s going full-bore into open source – specifically in the MySQL ecosystem — with the licensing approach, pricing, distribution strategy, and VC money from Sun that such a move naturally entails. I think this is a great idea, for a number of reasons: Read more

September 15, 2008

Infobright goes open source — sound bites

As has recently become my custom when there is industry news, I herewith provide quotable sound bites about Infobright and its move to an open source strategy. Weather permitting, I’ll be on a plane to the Netezza conference this afternoon. And I’ve only slept about 10 hours since Thursday. So I hope these suffice, although if they don’t and you email me I’ll try to respond by some time Tuesday morning.

Posts today on open source DBMS

September 14, 2008

Introduction to Jaspersoft – the actual business

There were so many numbers in my introductory call with Jaspersoft that I’ve split them out in a separate post. With that out of the way, here’s what’s really going on, per Nick Halsey.

The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite is BI technology designed to be integrated with operational apps. Thus, Jaspersoft says that operational BI is the core of its business. In particular:

Read more

September 14, 2008

Jaspersoft numbers

I chatted Friday with marketing VP Nick Halsey of Jaspersoft, which is probably the most successful open source business intelligence company. (That’s based just anecdotally, on mentions. I’d put Pentaho #2, with Talend commonly getting mentioned along with the two BI vendors for its ETL.) I’ll go straight to the numbers, per Nick, before talking in a separate post about what Jaspersoft actually sells.

Read more

August 11, 2008

EnterpriseDB update

I had lunch today with CTO Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB, who turns out to live in almost the same town I do (they technically separated in 1783, but share a high school today). DBMS-related highlights included:

Read more

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