DBMS product categories
Analysis of database management technology in specific product categories. Related subjects include:
MySQL/IBM — will everybody please calm down?
Reuters wrote a really stupid article on the MySQL/IBM deal, and some bloggers have gotten over-excited as well. Even the not-ignorant among these seem to be overlooking one or more of the following points:
- The IBM/MySQL deal is just for the iSeries.
- The iSeries is the successor to the AS/400 and System 38, and thus is in a decades-old family of machines that have some weirdnesses in their DBMS support.
- In particular, DB2 on the iSeries isn’t the same thing as DB2 on other boxes, although multiple DB2s do at least nominally run there.
So while it’s interesting and nice, this deal isn’t that relevant to IBM’s mainstream software business at all.
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| Categories: IBM and DB2, Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source | 4 Comments |
Free webinar on midrange OLTP/multipurpose DBMS, sponsored by EnterpriseDB
At noon Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 25, I’ll be doing a webinar about midrange OLTP/multipurpose DBMS, sponsored by EnterpriseDB, who not coincidentally are purveyors of same. You can sign up here.
Below is some of EnterpriseDB’s verbiage promoting the event. I particularly like the part where they refer to me as a “renowned industry guru.” 😉
The DBMS market, once thought to be an oligopoly, is experiencing some refreshing disruption – thanks to open source-based databases that are proving viable alternatives to traditional, more costly incumbents. Whether you’re trying to control database costs or support new application development, there’s never been a better time to reevaluate your database platform strategy.
But, how can you realistically compare alternatives like MySQL and EnterpriseDB against established database platforms like Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server?
Let your applications be your guide.
In this webcast, renowned industry guru Curt Monash provides an objective context in which to evaluate and select the right DBMS based on your application’s needs. He’ll discuss how all DBMS’ features are not all created equal in the way they address application-specific demands. Particular focus will be given to the unique requirements of transaction-intensive applications.
Join us for this eSeminar and learn how to:
- Go beyond the typical feature checklists of self-proclaimed “enterprise-class” offerings to provide a more in-depth barometer of a DBMS’ true capabilities
- Define the DBMS platform requirements for a variety of transaction-intensive applications
- Delineate between must-have and nice-to-have DBMS features for your application
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP | 2 Comments |
SolidDB and MySQL 5.0 – how industrial-strength in OLTP?
MySQL 4.0 is an OLTP joke. MySQL 5.0, however, shows a lot of progress in terms of real transactions, foreign keys, referential integrity, triggers, stored procedures and so on. In anticipation of the MySQL user conference next week, I got a quick briefing from Paola Lubet and Murat Demiroglu at Solid Information Technology, whose SolidDB is one of the two transactional storage engines for MySQL (the other is InnoDB, now owned by Oracle).
The layer provided by MySQL actually does most of what I think of as “language processing” – parsing, optimization, drivers, triggers, stored procedures, referential integrity, etc. SolidDB is a storage engine providing actual execution. Its features and virtues include:
• Online backup. (Note: Apparently, the extra-cost InnoDB online backup product isn’t showing up on price lists these days.)
• Optimistic (as well as pessimistic) concurrency control. This can be a good performance feature for applications that have a whole lot of Adds and very few Changes.
• General reliability. Unless they really botched the port, Solid benefits from a long history of very reliable operation.
• High availability. Scheduled for alpha in early summer and beta in the fall is a high-availability option. This initial-release will be master-slave synchronous replication. More sophisticated replication could come later on, as could memory-centric performance, if market conditions seem to warrant it (I’m betting they will).
| Categories: Mid-range, MySQL, OLTP, Open source, solidDB | 2 Comments |
Naming the DBMS disruptors
Edit: This post has largely been superseded by this more recent one defining mid-range relational DBMS.
I find myself defining a new product category – midrange OLTP/multipurpose DBMS. (Or just midrange DBMS for brevity.) Nothing earthshaking here; I’m simply referring to those products that: Read more
Deal prospects for data warehouse DBMS vendors
The fourth Monash Letter is now posted for Monash Advantage members (just 3 pages this time). It’s about forthcoming M&A in data warehouse DBMS, something that seems likely just because of the large number of current players. Some of the observations are:
- Oracle needs to buy somebody, because of its rather dire product problems at the data warehouse high end. And it’s very much in keeping with their recent behavior to do so.
- Teradata could be acquired sooner than people think. While there are tax considerations preventing an outright sale, these should be obviated if all of the current NCR is taken private. What’s more NCR minus Teradata is exactly the kind of healthy, slow-growth, niche company that private equity loves.
- DATAllegro is a natural merger partner for somebody. Their technical differentiation is almost DBMS-independent, so it could be easy to roll them into a larger overall product strategy. And they have enough market traction to have proved some non-trivial value.
- Kognitio seems desperate these days, with several odd or even underhanded marketing tactics. But they do have MPP bitmap software, something Sybase sorely lacks. So there’s an obvious potential combination between those two.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, Kognitio, Oracle, Sybase, Teradata | 3 Comments |
Lessons from EnterpriseDB
I had a nice conversation yesterday with Jim Mlodgenski of EnterpriseDB, covering both generalities and EnterpriseDB-specific stuff. Many of the generalities were predictable, and none were terribly shocking. Even so, I am dressed as Captain Obvious, and shall repeat a few of the ones I found interesting below:
| Categories: EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Structured documents, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
What’s going on at Calpont?
It’s been quite a while since anything substantive-sounding emerged from Calpont. They now have an odd one-page web site, with essentially no substance other than a tagline suggesting they’re shipping product (not bloody likely) and the names, titles, and email addresses of the president and seven vice-presidents. Only two of those officers were listed on the May, 2006 version of the site. Does anybody have an idea what may or may not be going on?
(Quick refresher: Calpont was developing a SQL processing chip, and designing an appliance around it. Whether this appliance would have disks or be all in-memory changed from time to time, a flexibility that was made possible by the apparent fact that none of these boxes actually shipped.)
| Categories: Calpont, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing | 2 Comments |
HP Neoview — smoke or fire?
The consistently outstanding blog Serious About Consulting has a detailed article about HP Neoview. I must admit, however, to some skepticism about the Neoview project. Edit: As of September, 2008, that’s a dead link, and the blog has been replaced by spam junk. Part of this is just the fact that a data warehouse appliance outfit that’s never gotten around to briefing me — ever — clearly doesn’t have its marketing act together. 😉 Also, I’ve never heard much about them competitively from anybody except Greenplum.
That said — as Jerry Held reminded me in a recent Vertica-related call, there’s no cosmic architectural reason why they couldn’t make it work. And if anybody’s going to see HP first competitively, it’s going to be Sun/Greenplum and maybe Teradata, and I’ll confess to not having chatted with Teradata for approximately six months.
White paper — Index-Light MPP Data Warehousing
Many of my thoughts on data warehouse DBMS and appliances have been collected in a white paper, sponsored by DATAllegro. As in a couple of other white papers — collected here — I coined a phrase to describe the core concept: Index-light. MPP row-oriented data warehouse DBMSs certainly have indices, which are occasionally even used. But the approaches to database design that are supported or make sense to use are simply different for DATAllegro, Netezza (the most extreme example of all) or Teradata than for Oracle or Microsoft. And the differences are all in the direction of less indexing.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper. Please pardon the formatting; it reads better in the actual .PDF Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, EMC, Theory and architecture | 4 Comments |
Oracle, Tangosol, objects, caching, and disruption
Oracle made a slick move in picking up Tangosol, a leader in object/data caching for all sorts of major OLTP apps. They do financial trading, telecom operations, big web sites (Fedex, Geico), and other good stuff. This is a reminder that the list of important memory-centric data handling technologies is getting fairly long, including:
- Object caching (e.g., Tangosol, Progress ObjectStore)
- In-memory RDBMS (e.g., Oracle TimesTen, Solid BoostEngine, McObject eXtremeDB)
- Stream processing (e.g., Progress Apama, Streambase)
And that’s just for OLTP; there’s a whole other set of memory-centric technologies for analytics as well.
When one connects the dots, I think three major points jump out:
- There’s a lot more to high-end OLTP than relational database management.
- Oracle is determined to be the leader in as many of those areas as possible.
- This all fits the market disruption narrative.
I write about Point #1 all the time. So this time around let me expand a little more on #2 and #3.
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