DBMS product categories
Analysis of database management technology in specific product categories. Related subjects include:
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
Some pushback from DATAllegro against the columnar argument
I was chatting with Stuart Frost this evening (DATAllegro’s CEO). As usual, I grilled him about customer counts; as usual, he was evasive, but expressed general ebullience about the pace of business; also as usual, he was charming and helpful on other subjects.
In particular, we talked about the Vertica story, and he offered some interesting pushback. Part was blindingly obvious — Vertica’s not in the marketplace yet, when they are the product won’t be mature, and so on. Part was the also obvious “we can do most of that ourselves” line of argument, some of which I’ve summarized in a comment here. But he made two other interesting points as well. Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Theory and architecture, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
Three bold assertions by Mike Stonebraker
In the first “meat” — i.e., other than housekeeping — post on the new Database Column blog, Mike Stonebraker makes three core claims:
1. Different DBMS should be used for different purposes. I am in violent agreement with that point, which is indeed a major theme of this blog.
2. Vertica’s software is 50X faster than anything non-columnar and 10X faster than anything columnar. Now, some of these stats surely come from the syndrome of comparing the future release of your product, as tuned by world’s greatest experts on it who also hope to get rich on their stock options in your company, vs. some well-established production release of your competitors’ products, tuned to an unknown level of excellence,* with the whole thing running test queries that you, in your impartial wisdom, deem representative of user needs. Or something like that … Read more
| Categories: Benchmarks and POCs, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database diversity, Michael Stonebraker, OLTP, Theory and architecture, TransRelational | 3 Comments |
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 |
Big stuff coming from DATAllegro
In the literal sense, that is. While the details on what I wrote about this a few weeks ago* are still embargoed, I’m at liberty to drop a few more hints.
*Please also see DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost’s two comments added today to that thread.
DATAllegro systems these days basically consist of Dell servers talking to EMC disk arrays, with Cisco Infiniband to provide fast inter-server communication without significant CPU load. Well, if you decrease the number of Dell servers per EMC box, and increase the number of disks per EMC box, you can slash your per-terabyte price (possibly at the cost of lowering performance).
Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, DATAllegro | 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 | 3 Comments |
DATAllegro heads for the high end
DATAllegro Stuart Frost called in for a prebriefing/feedback/consulting session. (I love advising my DBMS vendor clients on how to beat each other’s brains in. This was even more fun in the 1990s, when combat was generally more aggressive. Those were also the days when somebody would change jobs to an arch-rival and immediately explain how everything they’d told me before was utterly false …)
While I had Stuart on the phone, I did manage to extract some stuff I’m at liberty to use immediately. Here are the highlights: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata | 4 Comments |
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 |
Webinar Wednesday June 27 at 2:00 pm ET
I’m sorry for the short notice, but — well, never mind what the distractions have been. This Wednesday, at 2:00 pm Eastern time, I’m doing a webinar on behalf of Solid. The core subject is memory-centric OLTP data management. I will of course also cover some DBMS and memory-centric generalities.
More info and sign-up can be found here.
| Categories: In-memory DBMS, Memory-centric data management, OLTP, solidDB | Leave a Comment |
Memory-centric vs. conventional DBMS — a Solid difference
I had the chance to talk at length with Solid Information Technology tech guru Antoni Wolski about their memory-centric DBMS technology architecture. The most urgent topic was what made in-memory database managers inherently faster than disk-based ones that happened to have all the data in cache. But we didn’t really separate that subject from the general topic of how they made their memory-centric technology run fast, from its introduction in 2002 through substantial upgrades in the most recent release.
There were 4 main subtopics to the call:
1. Indexing structures that are very different from those of disk-based DBMS.
2. Optimizations to those indexing structures.
3. Optimizations to logging and checkpointing.
4. Miscellaneous architectural issues.
Read more
| Categories: In-memory DBMS, Memory-centric data management, OLTP, solidDB | 4 Comments |