NoSQL
Discussion of NoSQL concepts, products, and vendors.
Memcached-based company NorthScale launches
NorthScale, a start-up based around memcached, has just launched, two weeks after the Todd Hoff’s post arguing the MySQL/memcached combo is passe’. NorthScale wouldn’t necessarily argue with Todd, arguing that what you really should use instead is NorthScale’s combo of memcached and Membase, a memcached-like DBMS …
… or something like that. I don’t intend to write seriously about NorthScale until I have a better idea of what Membase is.
In the mean time,
- VentureBeat put up a solid post on NorthScale’s company history and so on
- Om Malik bought into the NorthScale memcached pitch
- TechCrunch has a low-quality post about NorthScale (although it wasn’t as error-riddled as the same author’s post about nStein, which Seth Grimes properly blasted)
| Categories: Cache, Clustering, Couchbase, memcached, NoSQL, Parallelization | Leave a Comment |
Toward a NoSQL taxonomy
I talked Friday with Dwight Merriman, founder of 10gen (the MongoDB company). He more or less convinced me of his definition of NoSQL systems, which in my adaptation goes:
NoSQL = HVSP (High Volume Simple Processing) without joins or explicit transactions
Within that realm, Dwight offered a two-part taxonomy of NoSQL systems, according to their data model and replication/sharding strategy. I’d be happier, however, with at least three parts to the taxonomy:
- How data looks logically on a single node
- How data is stored physically on a single node
- How data is distributed, replicated, and reconciled across multiple nodes, and whether applications have to be aware of how the data is partitioned among nodes/shards. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Data models and architecture, NoSQL, Parallelization, RDF and graphs, Structured documents, Theory and architecture | 13 Comments |
The Naming of the Foo
Let’s start from some reasonable premises. Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Database diversity, Hadoop, MapReduce, MarkLogic, NoSQL, OLTP, Theory and architecture | 37 Comments |
Some NoSQL links
I plan to post a few things soon about MongoDB, Cassandra, and NoSQL in general. So I’m poking around a bit reading stuff on the subjects. Here are some links I found. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cassandra, Continuent, Google, MySQL, NoSQL, Open source, RDF and graphs, Tokutek and TokuDB | 5 Comments |
Cassandra and the NoSQL scalable OLTP argument
Todd Hoff put up a provocative post on High Scalability called MySQL and Memcached: End of an Era? The post itself focuses on observations like:
- Facebook invented and is adopting Cassandra.
- Twitter is adopting Cassandra.
- Digg is adopting Cassandra.
- LinkedIn invented and is adopting Voldemort.
- Gee, it seems as if the super-scalable website biz has moved beyond MySQL/Memcached.
But in addition, he provides a lot of useful links, which DBMS-oriented folks such as myself might have previously overlooked. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Data models and architecture, NoSQL, OLTP, Open source, Parallelization, Specific users, Theory and architecture | 16 Comments |
Interesting trends in database and analytic technology
My project for the day is blogging based on my “Database and analytic technology: State of the union” talk of a few days ago. (I called it that because of when it was given, because it mixed prescriptive and descriptive elements, and because I wanted to call attention to the fact that I cover the union of database and analytic technologies – the intersection of those two sectors is an area of particular focus, but is far from the whole of my coverage.)
One section covered recent/ongoing/near-future trends that I thought were particularly interesting, including: Read more
The legit part of the NoSQL idea
I’ve written some snarky things about the “NoSQL” concept – or at least the moniker. (Carl Olofson’s term “non-schematic databases” seems less bad.) Yet I’m actually favorable about the increasing use of SQL alternatives. Perhaps I should pull those thoughts together. Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Database diversity, Hadoop, NoSQL, Theory and architecture | 21 Comments |
NoSQL Q and A
Neal Leavitt is writing an article for IEEE on NoSQL. So he’s circulated a long list of questions, encouraging people to answer as many or few as they choose. Unfortunately, most of the questions are technically meaningless, in that they implicitly rely on the false assumption that there is such a thing as a single or at least reasonably well-defined NoSQL technology. (I imagine most of his questions are really about key-value stores.) Nonetheless, I took a crack at a number of them before getting bored. Anybody else want to pitch in too? Read more
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Database diversity, NoSQL, Theory and architecture | 10 Comments |
Boston Big Data Summit keynote outline
Last month, Bob Zurek asked me to give a talk on “Big Data”, where “big” is anything from a few terabytes on up, then moderate a panel on cloud computing. We agreed that I could talk just from notes, without slides. So, since I have them typed up, I’m posting them below.
NoSQL?
Eric Lai emailed today to ask what I thought about the NoSQL folks, and especially whether I thought their ideas were useful for enterprises in general, as opposed to just Web 2.0 companies. That was the first I heard of NoSQL, which seems to be a community discussing SQL alternatives popular among the cloud/big-web-company set, such as BigTable, Hadoop, Cassandra and so on. My short answers are:
- In most cases, no.
- Most of these technologies are designed for simple, high-volume OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing.) Most large enterprises have an established way of doing OLTP, probably via relational database management systems. Why change?
- MapReduce is an exception, in that it’s designed for analytics. MapReduce may be useful for enterprises. But where it is, it probably should be integrated into an analytic DBMS.
- There’s one big countervailing factor to all these generalities — schema flexibility.
As for the longer form, let me start by noting that there are two main kinds of reason for not liking SQL. Read more