Open source
Discussion of relational database management systems that are offered through some version of open source licensing. Related subjects include:
Apparent turmoil at EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB seems to be facing a string of management departures:
- Bob Zurek, EnterpriseDB’s well-regarded CTO, is gone. (He landed at Infobright, after a stint of independent consulting.)
- Multiple rumors have founder Andy Astor leaving EnterpriseDB, and stepping back to an advisory role. One version has Tuesday, June 16 as Andy’s last day. Update: As of Wednesday, June 17, Andy Astor is no longer listed as being on EnterpriseDB’s management team.
- Fred Holahan, who was briefly VP of Marketing, is not listed on EnterpriseDB’s management team web page. And EnterpriseDB announced a new VP of Marketing and Product Management on May 21.
- Other rumors point to turmoil at EnterpriseDB as well.
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.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source | 3 Comments |
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:
- OF COURSE there are many MySQL users who need to move to a serious analytic DBMS.
- What’s less clear is whether there’s any big advantage to those users in remaining MySQL-compatible when they do move. I’m not sure what MySQL-specific syntax or optimizations they’d have that would be difficult to port to a non-MySQL system.
- It’s nice to see Abadi speaking well of Infobright and its technology.
- To say that Infobright went open source because it was “desperate” is overstated. That said, I don’t think Infobright was on track to prosper without going open source.
- While open source and MySQL go together, an appliance like Kickfire loses many (not all) of the benefits of open source.
- Calpont has indeed never disclosed a customer win. Any year now … (Just kidding, Vogel!)
- In general, seeing Abadi be so favorable toward Vertica competitors adds credibiity to the recent Hadoop vs. DBMS paper.
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.
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, DBMS product categories, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
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?
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | 11 Comments |
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:
- On the Open Database Alliance website
- In a press release
- On Monty Widenius’ blog
- In a Stephen O’Grady blog post based on a discussion with Monty Widenius
- In an ars technica blog post based on a discussion with Monty Program AB’s Kurt von Finck
But there’s no joy for the non-GPLed MySQL storage engine vendors in the early news. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Theory and architecture | 16 Comments |
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
| Categories: MySQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
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.”*
| Categories: MySQL, Open source | 12 Comments |
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:
- MySQL itself, soon to be owned by Oracle.
- MariaDB, Monty Widenius’ proposed mainstream MySQL alternative
- Percona, which seems to have some fans as a superior alternative to vendor-supplied MySQL/InnoDB
- Drizzle, which is directly focused at web-centric MySQL users who never wanted a robust DBMS in the first place.
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.
| Categories: Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source | 12 Comments |
MySQL storage engine round-up, with Oracle-related thoughts
Here’s what I know about MySQL storage engines, more or less.
- MySQL with MyISAM is fast. But it’s not transactional. Except for limited purposes, MySQL with MyISAM is a pretty crummy DBMS. Nothing can change that.
- MySQL with InnoDB is transactional. But it’s not particularly fast. MySQL with InnoDB is a pretty mediocre DBMS. Oracle could fix that, at least partially, over time.
- I don’t know much about Falcon, Maria, and so on. With Oracle winding up owning both MySQL and InnoDB, the motivation for those engines (except as Oracle-free forks) might fade.
- 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.
- Kickfire is next in line, offering a hardware-based growth path for users who’ve maxed out on what unaided MySQL can do. It remains to be seen for how many users the desire to keep things simple and stay with MySQL outweighs the desire to avoid custom hardware. Having Oracle salespeople all over those accounts surely wouldn’t help. Kickfire also has a second market, namely OEM vendors who are mainly interested in the superfast chip. That would probably be pretty unaffected by Oracle.
- Tokutek offers a technical proposition that’s hard to match head-on without going the CEP route. Users who care are likely to be MySQL shops. Tokutek’s main challenge is to prove that it sufficiently outdoes competing technical strategies for sufficiently many users. Oracle ownership of MySQL seems pretty irrelevant to Tokutek’s success or failure.
- Calpont offers a kind of lightweight Exadata alternative. With Calpont’s packaging and positioning perennially unclear, it’s difficult to predict the effect of a particular change — i.e., Oracle buying MySQL — in Calpont’s market environment.
- I haven’t heard from transactionally-oriented ScaleDB since I wrote about them a year ago. Apparently, they’re rolling out beta product this week, and their venerable techie guru sadly passed away earlier this month.
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Exadata, Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, Tokutek | 13 Comments |
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
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 9 Comments |
First thoughts on Oracle acquiring Sun
- Wow.
- And during the week of the MySQL conference, too.
- In the must-read slide presentation, Oracle’s says all the right things about being committed to all product lines and technologies. On the whole, this is believable.
- Oracle says it’s focusing Sun hardware sales on existing Oracle/Sun customers. Makes sense.
- Oracle mentions OpenStorage prominently. Makes sense. Integrating DBMS with storage is Oracle’s high-end DBMS future. (E.g., Exadata.)
- HP can’t be happy.
- MySQL and InnoDB are reunited.
- MySQL is apt to get decent, much as it would have under IBM.
- Even so, if you really believe in open source’s freedom, it’s time to look at PostgreSQL …
- … or EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus, although my recent dealings with EnterpriseDB underscore the importance of being VERY careful about counting your fingers after you shake hands with that company.
- And I wouldn’t be surprised if another shoe dropped soon on the EnterpriseDB front. (Please excuse the mixed metaphor.)
- I used to laugh at how many different app servers Sun had acquired. Oracle acquired a number too. Together it’s quite a pile of them.
- Oracle says acquiring Java is a great big deal. I’m not sure I see why that would really be true.
More later. I have a radio interview in a few minutes on a very different subject.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, HP and Neoview, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL | 19 Comments |
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:
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, MySQL, Open source, Parallelization, Theory and architecture | Leave a Comment |
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:
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 4 Comments |
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:
| Categories: Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase | 6 Comments |
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:
- Kickfire is initially focused on three heavily overlapping markets — network event analysis, the general Web 2.0/clickstream/online marketing analytics area, and MySQL/LAMP data warehousing.
- Kickfire has blogged about a few sales to unnamed customers in those markets.
- I think network management is a market that’s potentially friendly to five-figure-cost appliances. After all, networking equipment is generally sold in appliance form. Kickfire doesn’t dispute this analysis.
- Kickfire’s sales so far are to run databases in the sub-terabyte range, although both Kickfire and its customers intend to run bigger databases soon. (Kickfire describes the range as 300 GB - 1 TB.) Not coincidentally, Kickfire believes that MySQL doesn’t scale very well past 100 GB without a lot of partitioning effort (in the case of data warehouses) or sharding (in the case of OLTP).
- When Bruce became CEO, he let go some sales, marketing, and/or business development folks. He likes to call this a restructuring of Kickfire rather than a reduction-in-force, but anyhow — that’s what happened. There are now about 50 employees, and Kickfire still has most of the $20 million it raised last August in the bank. Edit: The company clarifies that it actually wound up with more sales and marketing people than before.
- Kickfire has thankfully deemphasized various marketing themes I found annoying, such as ascribing great weight to TPC-H benchmarks or explaining why John von Neumann originally made bad choices in his principles of computer design.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
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
| Categories: Open source, Oracle | 1 Comment |
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.
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
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehousing, Infobright, Open source, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 2 Comments |
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.
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
| Categories: Google, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, Parallelization | Leave a Comment |
Infobright update
In connection with the announcements that:
- Infobright is open sourcing its analytical DBMS product (which is a really good idea)
- Infobright raised a $10 million VC round, with Sun as a new investor
I got my first real Infobright update since January. Highlights included:
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 2 Comments |
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
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source, Uncategorized | 4 Comments |
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.
- For almost anybody in the MySQL world who needs high-performance analytics, Infobright is the first good solution.
- Infobright’s product strengths and use cases are a great match for open source.
- Most leading analytic DBMS have open source roots, but they generally haven’t been open sourced themselves. Infobright immediately becomes one of the premier open source analytic database offerings. The only serious open source rival that’s coming to mind is MonetDB.
- Storage engines are MySQL’s achilles heel. Each good MySQL storage engine is precious.
- Infobright has enough production references to show that it can get the job done for many data mart uses. It won’t meet everybody’s needs, but it’s well worth an experimental download.
- If you want to build a little data mart and run it yourself, most good products are too complicated or expensive. But in the right use cases, Infobright pretty much runs itself, and there’s no arguing with the Community Edition price (free).
- So Infobright is a great fit for the individual downloader – i.e., for the stereotypical open source user.
- Netezza, DATAllegro, Vertica, ParAccel, Greenplum, and Aster Data are all based in one way or another on PostgreSQL (even though Vertica includes no PostgreSQL code). DATAllegro was based on Ingres. Infobright and Kickfire are based on MySQL.
- If Infobright doesn’t get the job done, try downloading Vertica, which – while closed source – is also free for download and development.
- The “rough set” part of Infobright’s story is a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but the “knowledge grid” part is more real.
- When you compare Infobright to Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, or even Vertica, it’s kind of a toy. But when you compare it to generic MySQL, it’s more like rocket science.
- Infobright was too little, too late in the mainstream analytic DBMS market. They had to do something different. Kudos to them for recognizing that.
- The Infobright product has some serious limitations. If you want a market that’s willing to adopt a DBMS with serious limitations, the MySQL world is the place for you.
Posts today on open source DBMS
- Infobright’s smart move to open source
- General Infobright update
- Infobright sound bites
- The many faces of open source DBMS
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 3 Comments |
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:
| Categories: Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Open source | 2 Comments |
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.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Market share, Open source, Pricing | 6 Comments |
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:
- EnterpriseDB thinks PostgreSQL training and certification are a big deal for increasing PostgreSQL adoption.
- EnterpriseDB’s business focus right now (at least, one of them) is moving developers from interest to download to deployment and payment — i.e., the standard funnel for open source and open-source-inspired products.
- EnterpriseDB finds it important to be a good PostgreSQL community citizen. This makes a lot of sense, as EnterpriseDB doesn’t control the core PostgreSQL engine, even if it does employ some of the core PostgreSQL developers.
- But “open source” is not the same as “free”.
- I got the impression that the GridSQL technology EnterpriseDB acquired is being used to go after general read-mostly, horizontally-scaling applications (i.e., MySQL’s sweet spot). I did not get the impression, by way of contrast, that EnterpriseDB is out to play catch-up — e.g., with GreenPlum — in MPP data warehousing.
- Bob pointed out that something like “Vacuum” to clean up the database periodically is needed in a MVCC (MultiVersion Concurrency Control) engine. He thinks PostgreSQL’s autovacuum is good but not ideal.
- Bob draws this as yet another two-dimensional positioning graph, but in essence he thinks PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus are well-suited for a large space that’s above MySQL and below Oracle. I don’t think he really contradicted Kee Kwan’s opinion that there are good times to use PostgreSQL and good times to use MySQL.
- I was wrong when I previously said EnterpriseDB now offers MySQL portability. It just offers MySQL migration.
- The Elastra/EnterpriseDB cloud offering isn’t generally available yet.
- Stay tuned for developments in replication/high availability.
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, Open source, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
