Soundbites: the Facebook/MySQL/NoSQL/VoltDB/Stonebraker flap, continued
As a follow-up to the latest Stonebraker kerfuffle, Derrick Harris asked me a bunch of smart followup questions. My responses and afterthoughts include:
- Facebook et al. are in effect Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, not enterprise technology users. In particular:
- They have the technical chops to rewrite their code as needed.
- Unlike packaged software vendors, they’re not answerable to anybody for keeping legacy code alive after a rewrite. That makes migration a lot easier.
- If they want to write different parts of their system on different technical underpinnings, nobody can stop them. For example …
- … Facebook innovated Cassandra, and is now heavily committed to HBase.
- It makes little sense to talk of Facebook’s use of “MySQL.” Better to talk of Facebook’s use of “MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding.” That said:
- It’s hard to see why somebody today would use MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding for a new project. At least one of Couchbase or transparently-sharded MySQL is very likely a superior alternative. Other alternatives might be better yet.
- As noted above in the example of Facebook, the many major web businesses that are using MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding for existing projects can be presumed able to migrate away from that stack as the need arises.
Continuing with that discussion of DBMS alternatives:
- If you just want to write to the memcached API anyway, why not go with Couchbase?
- If you want to go relational, why not go with MySQL? There are many alternatives for scaling or accelerating MySQL — dbShards, Schooner, Akiban, Tokutek, ScaleBase, ScaleDB, Clustrix, and Xeround come to mind quickly, so there’s a great chance that one or more will fit your use case. (And if you don’t get the choice of MySQL flavor right the first time, porting to another one shouldn’t be all THAT awful.)
- If you really, really want to go in-memory, and don’t mind writing Java stored procedures, and don’t need to do the kinds of joins it isn’t good at, but do need to do the kinds of joins it is, VoltDB could indeed be a good alternative.
And while we’re at it — going schema-free often makes a whole lot of sense. I need to write much more about the point, but for now let’s just say that I look favorably on the Big Four schema-free/NoSQL options of MongoDB, Couchbase, HBase, and Cassandra.
More on NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)
Since posting last Wednesday morning that I’m looking into NoSQL and HVSP, I’ve had a lot of conversations, including with (among others):
- Dwight Merriman of 10gen (MongoDB)
- Damien Katz of Couchio (CouchDB)
- Matt Pfeil of Riptano (Cassandra)
- Todd Lipcon of Cloudera (HBase committer)
- Tony Falco of Basho (Riak)
- John Busch of Schooner
- Ori Herrnstadt of Akiban
| Categories: Akiban, Basho and Riak, Cache, Cassandra, Cloudera, Clustrix, CouchDB, DataStax, Facebook, HBase, Hadoop, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Object, Open source, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, Theory and architecture, Tokutek, memcached | 3 Comments |
I’m collecting data points on NoSQL and HVSP adoption
I was asked to do a magazine article on NoSQL, where by “NoSQL” is meant “whatever they talk about at NoSQL conferences.” By now the number of publications planning to run the article is up to 2, the deadline is next week and, crucially, it has been agreed that I may talk about HVSP in general, NoSQL and SQL alike.
It also is understood that, realistically, I can’t be expected to know and mention the very latest news for all the many products in the categories. Even so, I think this would be fine time to check just where NoSQL and HVSP adoption stand. Here is most of what I know, or links to same; it would be great if you guys would contribute additional data in the comment thread.
In the NoSQL area: Read more
The Clustrix story
After my recent post, the Clustrix guys raised their hands and briefed me. Takeaways included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Clustrix, Emulation, transparency, portability, Games and virtual worlds, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Parallelization, Solid-state memory | 7 Comments |
Clustrix may be doing something interesting
Clustrix launched without briefing me or, at least so far as I can tell, anybody else who knows much about database technology. But Clustrix did post a somewhat crunchy, no-registration-required, white paper. Based on that, I get the impression:
- Clustrix is making OLTP DBMS.
- The core problem Clustrix tries to solve is scale-out, without necessarily giving up SQL. (I couldn’t immediately tell whether Clustrix supports NoSQL-style key-value interfaces enthusiastically, grudgingly, or not at all.)
- Unlike Akiban or VoltDB, Clustrix makes database appliances. The Clustrix software seems to assume a Clustrix appliance.
- A key feature of Clustrix’s database appliances is that they rely on solid-state memory. I’m guessing that Clustrix appliances don’t even have disks, or that if they do the disks store some software or something, not actual data. (As previously noted, I agree with Oracle in thinking that much of the progress in database technology this decade will come from proper design for solid-state memory.)
- Clustrix talks of things that sound like compiled queries and attempts to avoid locks. However, it doesn’t sound as extreme in these regards as VoltDB.
- Clustrix also talks of things that sound like consistent hashing.
- The brand name “Sierra” also shows up along with the brand name “Clustrix.”