Clustering

Analysis of products and issues in database clustering. Relates subjects include:

November 3, 2011

MarkLogic’s Hadoop connector

It’s time to circle back to a subject I skipped when I otherwise wrote about MarkLogic 5: MarkLogic’s new Hadoop connector.

Most of what’s confusing about the MarkLogic Hadoop Connector lies in two pairs of options it presents you:

Otherwise, the whole thing is just what you would think:

MarkLogic said that it wrote this Hadoop connector itself.

Read more

October 23, 2011

NoSQL notes

Last week I visited with James Phillips of Couchbase, Max Schireson and Eliot Horowitz of 10gen, and Todd Lipcon, Eric Sammer, and Omer Trajman of Cloudera. I guess it’s time for a round-up NoSQL post. :)

Views of the NoSQL market horse race are reasonably consistent, with perhaps some elements of “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”

Read more

October 23, 2011

Transparent relational OLTP scale-out

There’s a perception that, if you want (relatively) worry-free database scale-out, you need a non-relational/NoSQL strategy. That perception is false. In the analytic case it’s completely ridiculous, as has been demonstrated by Teradata, Vertica, Netezza, and various other MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic DBMS vendors. And now it’s false for short-request/OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) use cases as well.

My favorite relational OLTP scale-out choice these days is the SchoonerSQL/dbShards partnership. Schooner Information Technology (SchoonerSQL) and Code Futures (dbShards) are young, small companies, but I’m not too concerned about that, because the APIs they want you to write to are just MySQL’s. The main scenarios in which I can see them failing are ones in which they are competitively leapfrogged, either by other small competitors – e.g. ScaleBase, Akiban, TokuDB, or ScaleDB — or by Oracle/MySQL itself. While that could suck for my clients Schooner and Code Futures, it would still provide users relying on MySQL scale-out with one or more good product alternatives.

Relying on non-MySQL NewSQL startups, by way of contrast, would leave me somewhat more concerned. (However, if their code is open sourced. you have at least some vendor-failure protection.) And big-vendor scale-out offerings, such as Oracle RAC or DB2 pureScale, may be more complex to deploy and administer than the MySQL and NewSQL alternatives.

October 23, 2011

Schooner pivots further

Schooner Information Technology started out as a complete-system MySQL appliance vendor. Then Schooner went software-only, but continued to brag about great performance in configurations with solid-state drives. Now Schooner has pivoted further, and is emphasizing high availability, clustered performance, and other hardware-agnostic OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) features. Fortunately, Schooner has some interesting stuff in those areas to talk about.

The short form of the SchoonerSQL (as Schooner’s product is now called) story goes roughly like this:

Read more

September 19, 2011

Are there any remaining reasons to put new OLTP applications on disk?

Once again, I’m working with an OLTP SaaS vendor client on the architecture for their next-generation system. Parameters include:

So I’m leaning to saying:   Read more

August 13, 2011

Couchbase technical update

My Couchbase business update with Bob Wiederhold was very interesting, but it didn’t answer much about the actual Couchbase product. For that, I talked with Dustin Sallings. We jumped around a lot, and some important parts of the Couchbase product haven’t had their designs locked down yet anyway. But here’s at least a partial explanation of what’s up.

memcached is a way to cache data in RAM across a cluster of servers and have it all look logically like a single memory pool, extremely popular among large internet companies. The Membase product — which is what Couchbase has been selling this year — adds persistence to memcached, an obvious improvement on requiring application developers to write both to memcached and to non-transparently-sharded MySQL. The main technical points in adding persistence seem to have been:

Couchbase is essentially Membase improved by integrating CouchDB into it, with the main changes being:

Let’s drill down a bit into Membase/Couchbase clustering and consistency. Read more

July 14, 2011

An odd claim attributed to Mike Stonebraker

This post has a sequel.

Last week, Mike Stonebraker insulted MySQL and Facebook’s use of it, by implication advocating VoltDB instead. Kerfuffle ensued. To the extent Mike was saying that non-transparently sharded MySQL isn’t an ideal way to do things, he’s surely right. That still leaves a lot of options for massive short-request databases, however, including transparently sharded RDBMS, scale-out in-memory DBMS (whether or not VoltDB*), and various NoSQL options. If nothing else, Couchbase would seem superior to memcached/non-transparent MySQL if you were starting a project today.

*The big problem with VoltDB, last I checked, was its reliance on Java stored procedures to get work done.

Pleasantries continued in The Register, which got an amazing-sounding quote from Mike. If The Reg is to be believed — something I wouldn’t necessarily take for granted — Mike claimed that he (i.e. VoltDB) knows how to solve the distributed join performance problem.  Read more

May 6, 2011

DB2 OLTP scale-out: pureScale

Tim Vincent of IBM talked me through DB2 pureScale Monday. IBM DB2 pureScale is a kind of shared-disk scale-out parallel OTLP DBMS, with some interesting twists. IBM’s scalability claims for pureScale, on a 90% read/10% write workload, include:

More precisely, those are counts of cluster “members,” but the recommended configuration is one member per operating system instance — i.e. one member per machine — for reasons of availability. In an 80% read/20% write workload, scalability is less — perhaps 90% scalability over 16 members.

Several elements are of IBM’s DB2 pureScale architecture are pretty straightforward:

Something called GPFS (Global Parallel File System), which comes bundled with DB2, sits underneath all this. It’s all based on the mainframe technology IBM Parallel Sysplex.

The weirdest part (to me) of DB2 pureScale is something called the Global Cluster Facility, which runs on its own set of boxes.  (Edit: Actually, see Tim Vincent’s comment below.) Read more

May 3, 2011

Oracle and Exadata: Business and technical notes

Last Friday I stopped by Oracle for my first conversation since January, 2010, in this case for a chat with Andy Mendelsohn, Mark Townsend, Tim Shetler, and George Lumpkin, covering Exadata and the Oracle DBMS. Key points included:  Read more

April 4, 2011

The MongoDB story

Along with CouchDB/Couchbase, MongoDB was one of the top examples I had in mind when I wrote about document-oriented NoSQL. Invented by 10gen, MongoDB is an open source, no-schema DBMS, so it is suitable for very quick development cycles. Accordingly, there are a lot of MongoDB users who build small things quickly. But MongoDB has heftier uses as well, and naturally I’m focused more on those.

MongoDB’s data model is based on BSON, which seems to be JSON-on-steroids. In particular:

Read more

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