Solid-state memory
Discussion of how developments in solid-state memory will affect database management. Related subjects include:
- Data warehouse appliances
- (in The Monash Report) The future of diskless PCs
Notes on short-request scale-out MySQL
A press person recently asked about:
… start-ups that are building technologies to enable MySQL and other SQL databases to get over some of the problems they have in scaling past a certain size. … I’d like to get a sense as to whether or not the problems are as severe and wide spread as these companies are telling me? If so, why wouldn’t a customer just move to a new database?
While that sounds as if he was asking about scale-out relational DBMS in general, MySQL or otherwise, short-request or analytic, it turned out that he was asking just about short-request scale-out MySQL. My thoughts and comments on that narrower subject include(d) but are not limited to: Read more
Teradata integrates in solid-state storage
For once, I think Teradata’s annual hardware refresh is pretty interesting, because of the integration of flash storage into its high-end “active enterprise data warehouse” product line. The essence of the announcement is:
- Teradata is rolling out a new appliance,* the 6680, which combines hard-disk and solid-state drives, relying on Teradata Virtual Storage.
- Teradata is also rolling out a hard-disk-based appliance,* the 6650, in a more routine annual refresh.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Pricing, Solid-state memory, Teradata | 3 Comments |
Comments on EMC Greenplum
I am annoyed with my former friends at Greenplum, who took umbrage at a brief sentence I wrote in October, namely “eBay has thrown out Greenplum“. Their reaction included:
- EMC Greenplum no longer uses my services.
- EMC Greenplum no longer briefs me.
- EMC Greenplum reneged on a commitment to fund an effort in the area of privacy.
The last one really hurt, because in trusting them, I put in quite a bit of effort, and discussed their promise with quite a few other people.
Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase
Membase, the company whose product is Membase and whose former company name is Northscale, has merged with CouchOne, the company whose product is CouchDB and whose former name is Couch.io. The result (product and company) will be called Couchbase. CouchDB inventor Damien Katz will join the Membase (now Couchbase) management team as CTO. Couchbase can reasonably be regarded as a document-oriented NoSQL DBMS, a product category I not coincidentally posted about yesterday.
In essence, Couchbase will be CouchDB with scale-out. Alternatively, Couchbase will be Membase with a richer programming interface. The Couchbase sweet spot is likely to be: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Cache, Couchbase, CouchDB, Market share and customer counts, memcached, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Solid-state memory | 2 Comments |
Schooner — flash-based, now software-only, and very fast
Last October I wrote about Schooner Information Technology, which made flash-based appliances, for MySQL, memcached, or persistent memcached. Schooner sold those appliances to close to 20 customers, but even so decided software-only was a better way to go.
Schooner’s core value proposition is that one Schooner box with flash does the job of a lot of MySQL or NoSQL boxes with hard drives. Highlights of the Schooner story — of which you can find more detail at the Schooner website — now include: Read more
| Categories: Clustering, memcached, MySQL, OLTP, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory | 3 Comments |
Architectural options for analytic database management systems
Mike Stonebraker recently kicked off some discussion about desirable architectural features of a columnar analytic DBMS. Let’s expand the conversation to cover desirable architectural characteristics of analytic DBMS in general. Read more
Introduction to Kaminario
At its core, the Kaminario story is simple:
- Throw out your disks and replace them with, not Flash, but actual DRAM.
-
Your IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) are so high* that you get the performance you need without any further system changes.
- The whole thing is very fast to set up.
In other words, Kaminario pitches a value proposition something like (my words, not theirs) “A shortcut around your performance bottlenecks.”
*1 million or so on the smallest Kaminario K2 appliance.
Kaminario asserts that both analytics and OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) are represented in its user base. Even so, the use cases Kaminario mentioned seemed to be concentrated on the analytic side. I suspect there are two main reasons:
- As Kaminario points out, OLTP apps commonly are designed to perform in the face of regrettable I/O wait.
- Also, analytic performance problems tend to arise more suddenly than OLTP ones do.*
*Somebody can think up a new analytic query overnight that takes 10 times the processing of anything they’ve ever run before. Or they can get the urge to run the same queries 10 times as often as before. Both those kinds of thing happen less often in the OLTP world.
Accordingly, Kaminario likes to sell against the alternative of getting a better analytic DBMS, stressing that you can get a Kaminario K2 appliance into production a lot faster than you can move your processing to even the simplest data warehouse appliance. Kaminario is probably technically correct in saying that; even so, I suspect it would often make more sense to view Kaminario K2 appliances as a transition technology, by which I mean:
- You have an annoying performance problem.
- Kaminario K2 could solve it very quickly.
- That buys you time for a more substantive fix.*
- If you want, you can redeploy your Kaminario K2 storage to solve your next-worst performance bottleneck.
On that basis, I could see Kaminario-like devices eventually getting to the point that every sufficiently large enterprise should have some of them, whether or not that enterprise has an application it believes should run permanently against DRAM block storage. Read more
| Categories: Investment research and trading, Kaminario, Solid-state memory, Storage, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 7 Comments |
Where ParAccel is at
Until recently, I was extremely critical of ParAccel’s marketing. But there was an almost-clean sweep of the relevant ParAccel executives, and the specific worst practices I was calling out have for the most part been eliminated. So I was open to talking and working with ParAccel again, and that’s now happening. On my recent California trip, I chatted with three ParAccel folks for a few hours. Based on that and other conversation, here’s the current ParAccel story as I understand it.
Read more
Quick introduction to Schooner Information Technology appliances
Back in August I talked with John Busch of Schooner Information Technology, which has a non-obvious URL. Schooner Information Technology sells Flash-based appliances that are mainly intended to run MySQL with blazing write performance.
This is one of those cases in which I warned that due to my September wave of family health issues I would cut a few blogging corners, so:
- I’m only going to write about the MySQL aspect, even though Schooner has a memcached product and claims to be able to run other NoSQL stuff as well.
- I’m not going to dig for company information beyond recalling:
- Schooner said that it has invested $20 million in R&D.
- Schooner’s appliances are resold by IBM.
- Schooner also has a direct sales force.
- One flagship customer had 30 TB of data on 17 Schooner nodes.
If Schooner wants to add some of what I’ve left out into the comments to this post, that would be great.
Schooner appliances are meant to be clustered, Read more
| Categories: memcached, MySQL, OLTP, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory | 4 Comments |
Notes and links October 3 2010
Some notes, follow-up, and links before I head out to California: Read more
| Categories: GIS and geospatial, Google, HP and Neoview, Humor, Kickfire, Netezza, Solid-state memory, Teradata, Web analytics | 3 Comments |