Continuent

Analysis of clustering technology vendor Continuent and its Tungsten product line. Related subjects include:

February 5, 2011

The Continuent Tungsten MySQL replication story

To the consternation of its then-CEO, I wrote very little about my then-client Continuent. However, when I knew Schooner’s recent announcement was coming, I reached out to other MySQL scale-out vendors too. I’ve already posted accordingly about CodeFutures (the dbShards guys) and ScaleBase. Now it’s late-responding Continuent’s turn.

Actually, what I’m mainly going to do is quote a very long email that Continuent’s current CEO/former CTO Robert Hodges sent me, and which I lightly edited.  Read more

July 31, 2010

Teradata, Xkoto Gridscale (RIP), and active-active clustering

Having gotten a number of questions about Teradata’s acquisition of Xkoto, I leaned on Teradata for an update, and eventually connected with Scott Gnau. Takeaways included:

Frankly, I’m disappointed at the struggles of clustering efforts such as Xkoto Gridscale or Continuent’s pre-Tungsten products, but if the DBMS vendors meet the same needs themselves, that’s OK too.

The logic behind active-active database implementations actually seems pretty compelling:  Read more

March 12, 2010

Some NoSQL links

I plan to post a few things soon about MongoDB, Cassandra, and NoSQL in general. So I’m poking around a bit reading stuff on the subjects. Here are some links I found. Read more

December 30, 2009

More miscellany

Adding to yesterday’s varied quick comments: Read more

September 3, 2009

Continuent on clustering

Robert Hodges, CTO of my client Continuent, put up a blog post laying out his and Continuent’s views on database clustering. Continuent offers Tungsten, its third try at database clustering technology, targeted at MySQL, PostgreSQL, and perhaps Oracle. Unlike Continuent’s more ambitious. second-generation product, Tungsten offers single-master replication, which in Robert’s view allows for great ease of deployment and administration (he likes the phrase “bone-simple”).

The downside to Continuent Tungsten ‘s stripped down architecture is that it doesn’t solve the most extreme performance scale-out problems. Instead, Continuent focuses on the other big benefits of keeping your data in more than one place, namely high availability and data loss prevention (i.e., backup).

Continuent has been around for a number of years, starting out in Finland but now being based in Silicon Valley. For most purposes, however, it’s reasonable to think of Continuent and Tungsten as start-up efforts.

As you might guess from the references to Finland and MySQL, Continuent’s products are open source, or at least have open source versions. I’m still a little fuzzy as to which features are open sourced and which are not. For that matter, I’m still unclear as to Tungsten’s feature list overall …

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