DBMS product categories
Analysis of database management technology in specific product categories. Related subjects include:
Greenplum is in the big leagues
After a March, 2007 call, I didn’t talk again with Greenplum until earlier this month. That changed fast. I flew out to see Greenplum last week and spent over a day with president/co-founder Scott Yara, CTO/co-founder Luke Lonergan, marketing VP Paul Salazar, and product management/marketing director Ben Werther. Highlights – besides some really great sushi at Sakae in Burlingame – start with an eye-opening set of customer proof points, such as: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Petabyte-scale data management, PostgreSQL | 19 Comments |
Three happy 100 terabyte-plus customers for DATAllegro
Over on my Network World blog, I asked the question “So who are DATAllegro’s actual current customers?” As regular readers know, that’s a fairly hard question to answer. TEOCO is widely known as DATAllegro’s flagship reference, but after that the list gets thin in a hurry.
As a by-the-by to other discussions, DATAllegro Stuart Frost undertook to respond in part himself. Specifically, he gave me two names of two other happy customers that are or imminently will be running DATAllegro against 100+ terabytes of user data. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, DBMS product categories | Leave a Comment |
A NoteWorthy win for Intersystems Cache’
A small Microsoft SQL Server-based medical application vendor called NoteWorthy Medical Systems bought a small Intersystems Cache’-based medical application vendor called Mars Medical Systems. NoteWorthy then decided to rebuild its product line on Intersystems Cache’. A press release ensued.*
*In general, my criticisms of Intersystems’ stealth marketing are beginning to be relaxed. On the other hand, if you want to be technical, I still haven’t actually talked with the company for years …
I spoke briefly with Mark Conner, founder of Mars Medical and now EVP of NoteWorthy, about why he so loves Cache’. (I asked what he disliked about the product; his response was an emphatic “Nothing”.) It basically boils down to two reasons:
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Mark thinks hierarchical data models are a great fit for medical applications. For example, the application’s UI (and local schema) look quite different depending on which particular complaints or diagnoses apply to particular patient visits.
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Cache’ just runs and runs w/o DBA intervention. Mark cited a figure of two support engineers for Mars Medical, supporting over 1,000 medical (largely group) practices, almost none of which have DBAs.
The latter feature is crucial to small ISVs selling application software to even smaller users, and is a big part of why Progress and Intersystems have large share in that market. More generally, it’s the most important and common technical advantage that mid-range database management systems generally enjoy versus the market leaders. (The other big advantage, of course, is pricing.)
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 |
Netezza update
In my usual dual role, I called Phil Francisco of Netezza to lay some post-Microsoft/DATAllegro consulting on him late on a Friday night — and then took the opportunity of being on the phone with him to get a general Netezza update. Netezza’s July quarter just ended, so they’re still in quiet period, so I didn’t press him for a lot of numerical detail. More generally, I didn’t find a lot out that wasn’t already covered in my May Netezza update. But notwithstanding all those disclaimers, it was still a pretty interesting chat. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Netezza, Sybase | 3 Comments |
Sun’s Rock chip is going to revolutionize OLTP? Yeah, right.
Ted Dziuba offers a profane and passionate screed to the effect that it would be really, really wonderful if Sun’s forthcoming Rock chip magically revolutionized OLTP. His idea — if I may dignify it with that term — seems to be that by solving some programming issues in multithreading, Sun will achieve orders of magnitude performance improvements in DBMS processing, with MySQL as the beneficiary.
Frankly, I don’t know what in the world Dziuba is talking about, and I strongly suspect that neither does he. Wikipedia wasn’t terribly enlightening, except to point out that some of the ideas originated with Tom Knight, which is encouraging. Ars Technica has a decent article about the Rock chip, but it’s hard to find support for Dziuba’s enthusiasm in their more sober discussion.
| Categories: MySQL, OLTP | 4 Comments |
How will Oracle save its data warehouse business?
By acquiring DATAllegro, Microsoft has seriously leapfrogged Oracle in data warehouse technology. All doubts about maturity and versatility notwithstanding, DATAllegro has a 10X or better size advantage (actually, I think it’s more like 20-40X) versus Oracle in warehouses its technology can straightforwardly handle. Oracle cannot afford to let this move go unanswered.
It’s of course possible that Oracle has been successfully developing comparable data warehouse technology internally. But it’s unlikely. Oracle hasn’t done anything that radical, internally and successfully, for about 15 years, RAC (Real Application Clusters) excepted. (I.e., since the object/relational extensibility framework started in Release 7.) So in all likelihood, the answer will come via acquisition. I think there are four candidates that make the most sense: Teradata, Vertica, ParAccel, and Greenplum. Kognitio (controlled by former Oracle honcho Geoff Squire) might be in the mix as well. Netezza is probably a non-starter because of its hardware-centric strategy.
Here’s why I’m emphasizing Teradata, Vertica, ParAccel, and Greenplum: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Oracle, ParAccel, Teradata, Vertica Systems | 15 Comments |
Microsoft is buying DATAllegro
I’ve long argued that:
- Oracle and Microsoft are doomed in the data warehouse market unless they acquire MPP/shared-nothing data warehouse DBMS and/or data warehouse appliances.
- DATAllegro is the ideal acquisition for either of them.
Microsoft has now validated my claim by agreeing to buy DATAllegro. As you probably know, we’ve been covering DATAllegro extensively, as per the links listed below.
Basic deal highlights include: Read more
Pushback on the PostgreSQL vs. MySQL comparison
It should come as no surprise that not everybody agrees with EnterpriseDB’s views on the PostgreSQL/MySQL comparison. In particular, the High Availability MySQL blog offers a detailed rebuttal post, with more in the comment thread. According to MySQL fans, EnterpriseDB got its facts wrong on several matters regarding MySQL and InnoDB, especially in the areas of triggers and locking. And of course they disagree with EnterpriseDB’s general conclusion. 🙂
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | Leave a Comment |
How is MySQL’s join performance these days?
In a comment thread on a recent post comparing MySQL to Postgres, Jonathon Moore chimed in based on experience with both products. His characterization of some MySQL problems: Read more
| Categories: Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 8 Comments |