Theory and architecture
Analysis of design choices in databases and database management systems. Related subjects include:
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An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?
I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:
- Focused on building a great data management and analytic stack for log management …
- … unlike all the other companies that might be saying the same thing
… - … and certainly unlike expensive, poorly-scalable Splunk …
- … and also unlike less-focused vendors of analytic RDBMS (which are also expensive) and/or Hadoop distributions.
At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.
Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.
A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with: Read more
Actian Vector Hadoop Edition
I have a small blacklist of companies I won’t talk with because of their particularly unethical past behavior. Actian is one such; they evidently made stuff up about me that Josh Berkus gullibly posted for them, and I don’t want to have conversations that could be dishonestly used against me.
That said, Peter Boncz isn’t exactly an Actian employee. Rather, he’s the professor who supervised Marcin Zukowski’s PhD thesis that became Vectorwise, and I chatted with Peter by Skype while he was at home in Amsterdam. I believe his assurances that no Actian personnel sat in on the call.
In other news, Peter is currently working on and optimistic about HyPer. But we literally spent less than a minute talking about that
Before I get to the substance, there’s been a lot of renaming at Actian. To quote Andrew Brust,
… the ParAccel, Pervasive and Vectorwise technologies are being unified under the Actian Analytics Platform brand. Specifically, the ParAccel technology … is being re-branded Actian Matrix; Pervasive’s technologies are rechristened Actian DataFlow and Actian DataConnect; and Vectorwise becomes Actian Vector.
and
Actian … is now “one company, with one voice and one platform” according to its John Santaferraro
The bolded part of the latter quote is untrue — at least in the ordinary sense of the word “one” — but the rest can presumably be taken as company gospel.
All this is by way of preamble to saying that Peter reached out to me about Actian’s new Vector Hadoop Edition when he blogged about it last June, and we finally talked this week. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Actian and Ingres, Clustering, Database compression, Hadoop, ParAccel, Pervasive Software, SQL/Hadoop integration, VectorWise, Workload management | 4 Comments |
Teradata bought Hadapt and Revelytix
My client Teradata bought my (former) clients Revelytix and Hadapt.* Obviously, I’m in confidentiality up to my eyeballs. That said — Teradata truly doesn’t know what it’s going to do with those acquisitions yet. Indeed, the acquisitions are too new for Teradata to have fully reviewed the code and so on, let alone made strategic decisions informed by that review. So while this is just a guess, I conjecture Teradata won’t say anything concrete until at least September, although I do expect some kind of stated direction in time for its October user conference.
*I love my business, but it does have one distressing aspect, namely the combination of subscription pricing and customer churn. When your customers transform really quickly, or even go out of existence, so sometimes does their reliance on you.
I’ve written extensively about Hadapt, but to review:
- The HadoopDB project was started by Dan Abadi and two grad students.
- HadoopDB tied a bunch of PostgreSQL instances together with Hadoop MapReduce. Lab benchmarks suggested it was more performant than the coyly named DBx (where x=2), but not necessarily competitive with top analytic RDBMS.
- Hadapt was formed to commercialize HadoopDB.
- After some fits and starts, Hadapt was a Cambridge-based company. Former Vertica CEO Chris Lynch invested even before he was a VC, and became an active chairman. Not coincidentally, Hadapt had a bunch of Vertica folks.
- Hadapt decided to stick with row-based PostgreSQL, Dan Abadi’s previous columnar enthusiasm notwithstanding. Not coincidentally, Hadapt’s performance never blew anyone away.
- Especially after the announcement of Cloudera Impala, Hadapt’s SQL-on-Hadoop positioning didn’t work out. Indeed, Hadapt laid off most or all of its sales and marketing folks. Hadapt pivoted to emphasize its schema-on-need story.
- Chris Lynch, who generally seems to think that IT vendors are created to be sold, shopped Hadapt aggressively.
As for what Teradata should do with Hadapt: Read more
| Categories: Aster Data, Citus Data, Cloudera, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Hadapt, Hadoop, MapReduce, Oracle, SQL/Hadoop integration, Teradata | 6 Comments |
The point of predicate pushdown
Oracle is announcing today what it’s calling “Oracle Big Data SQL”. As usual, I haven’t been briefed, but highlights seem to include:
- Oracle Big Data SQL is basically data federation using the External Tables capability of the Oracle DBMS.
- Unlike independent products — e.g. Cirro — Oracle Big Data SQL federates SQL queries only across Oracle offerings, such as the Oracle DBMS, the Oracle NoSQL offering, or Oracle’s Cloudera-based Hadoop appliance.
- Also unlike independent products, Oracle Big Data SQL is claimed to be compatible with Oracle’s usual security model and SQL dialect.
- At least when it talks to Hadoop, Oracle Big Data SQL exploits predicate pushdown to reduce network traffic.
And by the way – Oracle Big Data SQL is NOT “SQL-on-Hadoop” as that term is commonly construed, unless the complete Oracle DBMS is running on every node of a Hadoop cluster.
Predicate pushdown is actually a simple concept:
- If you issue a query in one place to run against a lot of data that’s in another place, you could spawn a lot of network traffic, which could be slow and costly. However …
- … if you can “push down” parts of the query to where the data is stored, and thus filter out most of the data, then you can greatly reduce network traffic.
“Predicate pushdown” gets its name from the fact that portions of SQL statements, specifically ones that filter data, are properly referred to as predicates. They earn that name because predicates in mathematical logic and clauses in SQL are the same kind of thing — statements that, upon evaluation, can be TRUE or FALSE for different values of variables or data.
The most famous example of predicate pushdown is Oracle Exadata, with the story there being:
- Oracle’s shared-everything architecture created a huge I/O bottleneck when querying large amounts of data, making Oracle inappropriate for very large data warehouses.
- Oracle Exadata added a second tier of servers each tied to a subset of the overall storage; certain predicates are pushed down to that tier.
- The I/O between Exadata’s two sets of servers is now tolerable, and so Oracle is now often competitive in the high-end data warehousing market,
Oracle evidently calls this “SmartScan”, and says Oracle Big Data SQL does something similar with predicate pushdown into Hadoop.
Oracle also hints at using predicate pushdown to do non-tabular operations on the non-relational systems, rather than shoehorning operations on multi-structured data into the Oracle DBMS, but my details on that are sparse.
Related link
- Chris Kanaracus’ coverage of the announcement quotes me at length.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Hadoop, Oracle, SQL/Hadoop integration, Theory and architecture | 8 Comments |
21st Century DBMS success and failure
As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.
DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.
In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.
Buyer inertia is a greater concern.
- A significant minority of enterprises are highly committed to their enterprise DBMS standards.
- Another significant minority aren’t quite as committed, but set pretty high bars for new DBMS products to cross nonetheless.
- FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about new DBMS is often justifiable, about stability and consistent performance alike.
A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.
- First the newer products (from Netezza onwards) were sold to organizations who knew they wanted great performance or price/performance.
- Then it became more about selling “business value” to organizations who needed more convincing about the benefits of great price/performance.
- Then the behemoth vendors became more competitive, as Teradata introduced lower-price models, Oracle introduced Exadata, Sybase got more aggressive with Sybase IQ, IBM bought Netezza, EMC bought Greenplum, HP bought Vertica and so on. It is now hard for a non-behemoth analytic RDBMS vendor to make headway at large enterprise accounts.
- Meanwhile, Hadoop has emerged as serious competitor for at least some analytic data management, especially but not only at internet companies.
Otherwise I’d say: Read more
Using multiple data stores
I’m commonly asked to assess vendor claims of the kind:
- “Our system lets you do multiple kinds of processing against one database.”
- “Otherwise you’d need two or more data managers to get the job done, which would be a catastrophe of unthinkable proportion.”
So I thought it might be useful to quickly review some of the many ways organizations put multiple data stores to work. As usual, my bottom line is:
- The most extreme vendor marketing claims are false.
- There are many different choices that make sense in at least some use cases each.
Horses for courses
It’s now widely accepted that different data managers are better for different use cases, based on distinctions such as:
- Short-request vs. analytic.
- SQL vs. non-SQL (NoSQL or otherwise).
- Expensive/heavy-duty vs. cheap/easy-to-support.
Vendors are part of this consensus; already in 2005 I observed
For all practical purposes, there are no DBMS vendors left advocating single-server strategies.
Vendor agreement has become even stronger in the interim, as evidenced by Oracle/MySQL, IBM/Netezza, Oracle’s NoSQL dabblings, and various companies’ Hadoop offerings.
Multiple data stores for a single application
We commonly think of one data manager managing one or more databases, each in support of one or more applications. But the other way around works too; it’s normal for a single application to invoke multiple data stores. Indeed, all but the strictest relational bigots would likely agree: Read more
Optimism, pessimism, and fatalism — fault-tolerance, Part 2
The pessimist thinks the glass is half-empty.
The optimist thinks the glass is half-full.
The engineer thinks the glass was poorly designed.
Most of what I wrote in Part 1 of this post was already true 15 years ago. But much gets added in the modern era, considering that:
- Clusters will have node hiccups more often than single nodes will. (Duh.)
- Networks are relatively slow even when uncongested, and furthermore congest unpredictably.
- In many applications, it’s OK to sacrifice even basic-seeming database functionality.
And so there’s been innovation in numerous cluster-related subjects, two of which are:
- Distributed query and update. When a database is distributed among many modes, how does a request access multiple nodes at once?
- Fault-tolerance in long-running jobs.When a job is expected to run on many nodes for a long time, how can it deal with failures or slowdowns, other than through the distressing alternatives:
- Start over from the beginning?
- Keep (a lot of) the whole cluster’s resources tied up, waiting for things to be set right?
Distributed database consistency
When a distributed database lives up to the same consistency standards as a single-node one, distributed query is straightforward. Performance may be an issue, however, which is why we have seen a lot of:
- Analytic RDBMS innovation.
- Short-request applications designed to avoid distributed joins.
- Short-request clustered RDBMS that don’t allow fully-general distributed joins in the first place.
But in workloads with low-latency writes, living up to those standards is hard. The 1980s approach to distributed writing was two-phase commit (2PC), which may be summarized as: Read more
| Categories: Clustering, CouchDB, Data warehousing, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, Facebook, Hadoop, MapReduce, Sybase, Theory and architecture, VoltDB and H-Store | 1 Comment |
Optimism, pessimism and fatalism — fault-tolerance, Part 1
Writing data management or analysis software is hard. This post and its sequel are about some of the reasons why.
When systems work as intended, writing and reading data is easy. Much of what’s hard about data management is dealing with the possibility — really the inevitability — of failure. So it might be interesting to survey some of the many ways that considerations of failure come into play. Some have been major parts of IT for decades; others, if not new, are at least newly popular in this cluster-oriented, RAM-crazy era. In this post I’ll focus on topics that apply to single-node systems; in the sequel I’ll emphasize topics that are clustering-specific.
Major areas of failure-aware design — and these overlap greatly — include:
- Backup and restore. In its simplest form, this is very basic stuff. That said — any decent database management system should let backups be made without blocking ongoing database operation, with the least performance impact possible.
- Logging, rollback and replay. Logs are essential to DBMS. And since they’re both ubiquitous and high-performance, logs are being used in ever more ways.
- Locking, latching, transactions and consistency. Database consistency used to be enforced in stern and pessimistic ways. That’s changing, big-time, in large part because of the requirements of …
- … distributed database operations. Increasingly, modern distributed database systems are taking the approach of getting work done first, then cleaning up messes when they occur.
- Redundancy and replication. Parallel computing creates both a need and an opportunity to maintain multiple replicas of data at once, in very different ways than the redundancy and replication of the past.
- Fault-tolerant execution. When one node is inoperative, inaccessible, overloaded or just slow, you may not want a whole long multi-node job to start over. A variety of techniques address this need.
Long-standing basics
In a single-server, disk-based configuration, techniques for database fault-tolerance start: Read more
| Categories: In-memory DBMS, Sybase, Theory and architecture | 4 Comments |
Notes and comments, May 6, 2014
After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion.
- My claim that Spark will replace Hadoop MapReduce got much Twitter attention — including some high-profile endorsements — and also some responses here.
- My MemSQL post led to a vigorous comparison of MemSQL vs. VoltDB.
- My post on hardware and storage spawned a lively discussion of Hadoop hardware pricing; even Cloudera wound up disagreeing with what I reported Cloudera as having said. Sadly, there was less response to the part about the partial (!) end of Moore’s Law.
- My Cloudera/SQL/Impala/Hive apparently was well-balanced, in that it got attacked from multiple sides via Twitter & email. Apparently, I was too hard on Impala, I was too hard on Hive, and I was too hard on boxes full of cardboard file cards as well.
- My post on the Intel/Cloudera deal garnered a comment reminding us Dell had pushed the Intel distro.
- My CitusDB post picked up a few clarifying comments.
Here is a catch-all post to complete the set. Read more
Introduction to CitusDB
One of my lesser-known clients is Citus Data, a largely Turkish company that is however headquartered in San Francisco. They make CitusDB, which puts a scale-out layer over a collection of fully-functional PostgreSQL nodes, much like Greenplum and Aster Data before it. However, in contrast to those and other Postgres-based analytic MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) DBMS:
- CitusDB does not permanently fork PostgreSQL; Citus Data has committed to always working with the latest PostgreSQL release, or at least with one that’s less than a year old.
- Citus Data never made the “fat head” mistake — if a join can’t be executed directly on the CitusDB data-storing nodes, it can’t be executed in CitusDB at all.
- CitusDB follows the modern best-practice of having many virtual nodes on each physical node. Default size of a virtual node is one gigabyte. Each virtual node is technically its own PostgreSQL table.*
- Citus Data has already introduced an open source column-store option for PostgreSQL, which CitusDB of course exploits.
*One benefit to this strategy, besides the usual elasticity and recovery stuff, is that while PostgreSQL may be single-core for any given query, a CitusDB query can use multiple cores by virtue of hitting multiple PostgreSQL tables on each node.
Citus has thrown a few things against the wall; for example, there are two versions of its product, one which involves HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and one of which doesn’t. But I think Citus’ focus will be scale-out PostgreSQL for at least the medium-term future. Citus does have actual customers, and they weren’t all PostgreSQL users previously. Still, the main hope — at least until the product is more built-out — is that existing PostgreSQL users will find CitusDB easy to adopt, in technology and price alike.