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:
- A persistent backing store (duh), namely SQLite.
- A change to the hashing algorithm, to avoid losing data when the cluster configuration is changed.
Couchbase is essentially Membase improved by integrating CouchDB into it, with the main changes being:
- Changing the backing store to CouchDB (duh). This will be in the first Couchbase release.
- Adding cross data center replication on CouchDB’s consistency model. This will not, I believe, be in the first Couchbase release.
- Offering CouchDB’s programming and query interfaces as an option. So far as I can tell, this will be implemented straightforwardly in the first Couchbase release, with elegance planned for later down the road.
Let’s drill down a bit into Membase/Couchbase clustering and consistency. Read more
| Categories: Cache, Clustering, Couchbase, Memory-centric data management, MySQL, Parallelization, Solid-state memory, memcached | 6 Comments |
Couchbase business update
I decided I needed some Couchbase drilldown, on business and technology alike, so I had solid chats with both CEO Bob Wiederhold and Chief Architect Dustin Sallings. Pretty much everything I wrote at the time Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase (the company) still holds up. But I have more detail now. 
Context for any comments on customer traction includes:
- Membase went into limited production release in October, and full release in January. Similar things are true of CouchDB.
- Hence, most sales of Couchbase’s products have been made over the past 6 months.
- Couchbase (the merged product) is at this point only in a pre-production developer’s release.
- Couchbase has both a direct sales force and a classic open-source “funnel”-based online selling model. Naturally, Couchbase’s understanding of what its customers are doing is more solid with respect to the direct sales base.
- Most of Couchbase’s revenue to date seems to have come from a limited number of big-ticket “lighthouse” accounts (as opposed to, say, the larger number of smaller deals that come in through the online funnel).
That said,
- Most Membase purchases are for new applications, as opposed to memcached migrations. However, customers are the kinds of companies that probably also are using memcached elsewhere.
- Most other Membase purchases are replacements for the Membase/MySQL combination. Bob says those are easy sales with short sales cycles.
- Pure memcached support is a small but non-zero business for Couchbase, and a fine source of upsell opportunities.
- In the pipeline but not so much yet in the customer base are SaaS vendors and the like who use and may want to replace traditional DBMS such as Oracle. Other than among those, Couchbase doesn’t compete much yet with Oracle et al.
- Pure CouchDB isn’t all that much of a business, at least relative to community size, as CouchDB is a single-server product commonly used by people who are content not to pay for support.
Membase sales are concentrated in five kinds of internet-centric companies, which in declining order are: Read more
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.
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
| Categories: Cache, Clustering, Couchbase, Games and virtual worlds, In-memory DBMS, Michael Stonebraker, MySQL, Parallelization, Theory and architecture, VoltDB and H-Store, memcached | 20 Comments |
Traditional databases will eventually wind up in RAM
In January, 2010, I posited that it might be helpful to view data as being divided into three categories:
- Human/Tabular data –i.e., human-generated data that fits well into relational tables or arrays.
- Human/Nontabular data — i.e., all other data generated by humans.
- Machine-Generated data.
I won’t now stand by every nuance in that post, which may differ slightly from those in my more recent posts about machine-generated data and poly-structured databases. But one general idea is hard to dispute:
Traditional database data — records of human transactional activity, referred to as “Human/Tabular data above” — will not grow as fast as Moore’s Law makes computer chips cheaper.
And that point has a straightforward corollary, namely:
It will become ever more affordable to put traditional database data entirely into RAM. Read more
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, CouchDB, Couchbase, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Solid-state memory, memcached | 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, MySQL, OLTP, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory, memcached | 3 Comments |
More notes on Membase and memcached
As a companion to my post about Membase last week, the company has graciously allowed me to post a rather detailed Membase slide deck. (It even has pricing.) Also, I left one point out.
Membase announced a Cloudera partnership. I couldn’t detect anything technically exciting about that, but it serves to highlight what I do find to be an interesting usage trend. A couple of big Web players (AOL and ShareThis) are using Hadoop to crunch data and derive customer profile data, then feed that back into Membase. Why Membase? Because it can serve up the profile in a millisecond, as part of a bigger 40-millisecond-latency request.
And why Hadoop, rather than Aster Data nCluster, which ShareThis also uses? Umm, I didn’t ask.
When I mentioned this to Colin Mahony, he said Vertica had similar stories. However, I don’t recall whether they were about Membase or just memcached, and he hasn’t had a chance to get back to me with clarification. (Edit: As per Colin’s comment below, it’s both.)
| Categories: Aster Data, Cache, Cloudera, Couchbase, Hadoop, Memory-centric data management, NoSQL, Pricing, Specific users, Vertica Systems, Web analytics, memcached | 7 Comments |
Membase simplifies name, goes GA
The company Northscale that makes the product Membase is now the company Membase that makes the product Membase. Good. Also, the product Membase has now gone GA.
I wrote back in August about Membase, and that covers most of what I think, with perhaps a couple of exceptions: Read more
| Categories: Basho and Riak, Cache, Couchbase, Memory-centric data management, NoSQL, memcached | 4 Comments |
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: MySQL, OLTP, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory, memcached | 4 Comments |