May 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.
When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.
*A “Barney” announcement is one whose entire content boils down to “I love you; you love me.”
According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include:
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Posted in Data types, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source RDBMS, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general | 3 Comments »
April 29th, 2008 Curt Monash
Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:
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There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.
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Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.
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If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.
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Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Complex event/stream processing (CEP), Data types, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Games and virtual worlds, Memory-centric data management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Specialized data management in general, Truviso | 1 Comment »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve pointed out in the past that solid-state/Flash memory could be a good alternative to hard disks in PCs and enterprise systems alike. Well, when that happy day arrives, what will be some of the implications for database management software architecture?
- Compression will be even more important. Cost per terabyte of storage will spike up for that storage that is moved from disk to solid-state.
- The sequential-rather-than-random reading strategy of data warehouse appliance makers may become less relevant. The one way to get rid of the disk-speed bottleneck is to get rid of disks.
- DBMS will need to write data as rarely as possible. Solid-state memory tends to wear out if you keep writing over it. Assuming this problem gets better over time (if it doesn’t, this whole discussion is moot) but isn’t totally solved, architectures which have fewer writes are on the whole better.
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Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Database theory and practice, Netezza, Specialized data management in general | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is:
- Extending Netezza’s SQL via user-defined functions (which probably wasn’t too hard, especially since the Netezza engine is related to PostgreSQL).
- Providing a C-to-Verilog compiler.
- Providing an application development environment and associated tools. (Presumably rather primitive, but I haven’t really checked it out.)
The applications mentioned in the NDN press release, and I quote directly, are:
- Multi-dimensional geospatial analytics on comprehensive data sets for risk management
- Predictive model scoring for customer segmentation, enabling real-time offer provisioning for customers
- Iterative modeling and analytics on billions of call detail records (CDRs) for telco price optimization
- Real-time Monte Carlo simulations on terabytes of detail-level data for risk management
- “Fingerprinting” with hashing algorithms for chain-of-custody document fingerprinting and to ensure that files transferred are intact
- Fuzzy text search analysis uses algorithms that provide a “best guess” of most likely results
Netezza says that the greatest interest has come from usual-suspect sophisticated users, specifically intelligence agencies and perhaps also financial services firms. But naturally, the partners actually trotted out at Netezza’s user conference were mainly hopeful small-company ISVs. The biggest stir was made by not-so-small SAS, which evidently believes this new capability will provide massive improvements to SAS/Netezza combined performance.
In principle, there are four different ways this new programmability could be a big win: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Native XML, Netezza, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, SAS Institute, Specialized data management in general | 8 Comments »
September 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
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 the rest of this entry »
Posted in Columnar architectures, Data warehousing, Database diversity, Database theory and practice, Michael Stonebraker, OLTP database management, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general, TransRelational | 2 Comments »
March 25th, 2007 Curt Monash
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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Posted in Cache, Complex event/stream processing (CEP), Database diversity, Database theory and practice, Memory-centric data management, OLTP database management, Oracle, Oracle TimesTen, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general, StreamBase, solidDB | 2 Comments »
October 29th, 2005 Curt Monash
Chris Date is quite annoyed with me, and has taken issue with various things I’ve written. Some of his reasoning is hard to follow. For example, he said something to the effect that it would be silly for him to ever say anything misleading, because he’d immediately be caught out. Uh, Chris – you’re the guy who’s berating the terrible level of education and understanding in a field for which YOU WROTE THE DEFINITIVE TEXTBOOK (which has sold “over 700,000 copies”). If your readers can’t even understand the correct things you say in your book, why should they be able to instantly spot the errors? Read the rest of this entry »
Technorati Tags: Chris Date
Posted in Database theory and practice, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general, TransRelational | 26 Comments »
October 10th, 2005 Curt Monash
In my October Computerworld column, I tried to explain some of the reasons why I don’t think the pure Relational Model should be as absolutely dominant as its most fervent proponents assert.
The key points were:
1. Logical and physical modeling will never be completely separable.
2. “True relational” DBMSs are very unlikely ever to be practically useful, except perhaps in narrow niches.
3. Enterprises don’t fully control their data models.
4. Duplicated data is not inherently bad.
5. Saying that the relational model (RM) is based on mathematics proves almost nothing.
6. IT isn’t just concerned with facts.
For details see the link above.
And while I’m at it, here’s a link to my September Computerworld column, on three life-and-death apps that won’t get built with a relational architecture.
Technorati Tags: Database, DBMS, DBMS2, relational, relational database, relational model, software
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Posted in Database theory and practice, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general | 29 Comments »
October 10th, 2005 Curt Monash
I don’t know for a fact that the Amazon.com bookstore is the world’s biggest OLTP application — but if it isn’t, it’s close.
And the thing is — that’s never been an entirely relational application. Oh, the ordering part surely is. But the inventory lookup is currently driven by an OODBMS (from Progress). The personalization used to be done in Red Brick (I knew which software replaced it, but I’m forgetting at the moment — it may even be one of the relational warehouse appliance vendors). And of course the full-text search is a custom in-house system.
Posted in Amazon, SimpleDB, and S3, Cache, Database theory and practice, Memory-centric data management, OLTP database management, Objects, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Specialized data management in general, Specific users | 3 Comments »