Continuent
Analysis of clustering technology vendor Continuent and its Tungsten product line. Related subjects include:
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.
- A little over a year ago, Julian Browne put up a great post on Eric Brewer’s CAP conjecture/theorem, which provides much of the impetus to relax the traditional requirement for atomicity/consistency.
- Even more directly inspirational to NoSQL technology development were two seminal papers: Google’s on BigTable and Amazon’s on Dynamo. (That said, I’m having trouble getting myself to actually read them from start to finish, especially since they’ve been superseded by subsequent technology development.)
- 10gen (the MongoDB guys) hosted a NoSQL conference yesterday. Much blogging has ensued. The best post I’ve seen so far was by Adam Marcus. I find the graph database notes near the bottom particularly interesting.
- Mark Callaghan hit back against the NoSQL movement hype, and in particular against the MySQL/memcached is passe‘ meme. On the other hand, he also bemoaned many failings of MySQL. On the third hand, he praised or at least expressed hope for a variety of MySQL-related technologies, including Tokutek’s TokuDB and Continuent’s Tungsten.
- In connection with that debate, Mark Rendle offered a funny rant, mainly pro-NoSQL, in the style of a Socratic dialogue.
- John Quinn of Digg recently described Digg’s move from MySQL to Cassandra, and outlined a lot of features Digg was adding to Cassandra, all of which it is open-sourcing.
- The NoSQL guys maintain their own long list of NoSQL-related links.
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cassandra, Continuent, Google, MySQL, NoSQL, Open source, RDF and graphs, Tokutek | 5 Comments |
More miscellany
Adding to yesterday’s varied quick comments: Read more
| Categories: Clearpace, Continuent, Infobright, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
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 …
| Categories: Clustering, Continuent, MySQL, Open source, PostgreSQL | 2 Comments |