March 1, 2013

Open source strategies

From time to time I advise a software vendor on how, whether, or to what extent it should offer its technology in open source. In summary, I believe:

Here’s why.

An “open source software” business model and strategy might include:

A “closed source software” business model and strategy might include:

Those look pretty similar to me.

Of course, there can still be differences between open and closed source. In particular: Read more

August 6, 2012

Notes, links and comments August 6, 2012

I haven’t done a notes/link/comments post for a while. Time for a little catch-up.

1. MySQL now has a memcached integration story. I haven’t checked the details. The MySQL team is pretty hard to talk with, due to the heavy-handedness of Oracle’s analyst relations.

2. The Large Hadron Collider offers some serious numbers, including:

3. One application area we don’t talk about much for analytic technologies is education. However: Read more

June 18, 2012

Introduction to MemSQL

I talked with MemSQL shortly before today’s launch. MemSQL technology basics are:

MemSQL’s performance claims include:

MemSQL company basics include: Read more

April 7, 2012

Many kinds of memory-centric data management

I’m frequently asked to generalize in some way about in-memory or memory-centric data management. I can start:

Getting more specific than that is hard, however, because:

Consider, for example, some of the in-memory data management ideas kicking around. Read more

February 15, 2012

Quick notes on MySQL Cluster

According to the MySQL Cluster home page, today’s MySQL Cluster release has — give or take terminology details 🙂 —  added transparent sharding (Edit: Actually, please see the first comment below) and a memcached interface. My quick comments on all this to a reporter a couple of days ago were:

I don’t really know enough about MySQL Cluster right now to comment in more detail.

August 13, 2011

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:

Couchbase is essentially Membase improved by integrating CouchDB into it, with the main changes being:

Let’s drill down a bit into Membase/Couchbase clustering and consistency. Read more

August 13, 2011

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:

That said,

Membase sales are concentrated in five kinds of internet-centric companies, which in declining order are: Read more

July 15, 2011

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:

Continuing with that discussion of DBMS alternatives:

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.

July 14, 2011

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

May 23, 2011

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:

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

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