MySQL
Analysis of open source DBMS vendor MySQL (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems), its products, and other products in the MySQL ecosystem. Related subjects include:
Yet more on the GPL, WordPress themes, and the implications for MySQL storage engines
The debate I wrote about a few days ago over whether or not the WordPress theme called Thesis needed to be GPLed has been resolved in practice – it will be. More precisely, the parts that WordPress developers and the Free Software Foundation said need to be GPLed will be GPLed, while the rest won’t be, those parts being, in essence, the more “artistic” elements.
A consensus seems to have emerged that Thesis had actually copied beyond-fair-use amounts of WordPress code, which if true was Game Over. Beyond that, however, both sides of the strongly-viral-GPL debate scored some points. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source | 6 Comments |
New insights into the GPL vs. MySQL storage engine debates
Around the time of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL, there was a lot of discussion as to whether MySQL’s GPL license could inhibit MySQL storage engine vendors from selling their products without MySQL code (e.g., with MySQL-fork front-ends). I argued No. Most people, however, seemed to think “Yes, and even if the matter isn’t clear, the threat of nasty lawyers creates enough FUD to be a practical market problem for the storage engine vendors.” Based on those concerns, I eventually took the position that Oracle should be inhibited for antitrust reasons from invoking its real or alleged GPL rights to mess with the MySQL storage engine vendors. Oracle’s agreement with the EU alleviated that concern, except that there was an annoying time limit on the alleviation.
Now a related can of worms has been opened in a related technology area — WordPress and WordPress themes. Since many bloggers use WordPress, this has gotten a lot of attention, and some interesting new insights have emerged. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle | 10 Comments |
Infobright’s Release 3.4
Infobright called a couple weeks ago to discuss, among other subjects, its subsequently-released Infobright Release 3.4. I made no effort to distinguish between community/open source and professional/chargeable editions, but leaving that aside, it seems fair to characterize Infobright 3.4 as having two overlapping primary themes:
- Performance and bottleneck cleanup.
- “Omigod, you mean you didn’t have that feature before?” cleanup.
That said, the traditional release for cleaning up the last huge gaps in an analytic DBMS product seems have become 4.0; recent examples include Aster Data, Vertica and Greenplum. Infobright seems on track to be another example of that rule.
Ack. Now that I’ve said that, other vendors are going to be tempted to accelerate their numbering so as to reach the 4.0 mark sooner …
A lot of Infobright performance enhancements are in the vein “We used to rely on generic MySQL for that, but now we do it ourselves, and it works a lot better.” Examples include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Infobright, MySQL, Workload management | 6 Comments |
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 | 8 Comments |
Notes on the evolution of OLTP database management systems
The past few years have seen a spate of startups in the analytic DBMS business. Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster Data and others are all reasonably prosperous, alongside older specialty product vendors Teradata and Sybase (the Sybase IQ part). OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) and general purpose DBMS startups, however, have not yet done as well, with such success as there has been (MySQL, Intersystems Cache’, solidDB’s exit, etc.) generally accruing to products that originated in the 20th Century.
Nonetheless, OLTP/general-purpose data management startup activity has recently picked up, targeting what I see as some very real opportunities and needs. So as a jumping-off point for further writing, I thought it might be interesting to collect a few observations about the market in one place. These include:
- Big-brand OLTP/general-purpose DBMS have more “stickiness” than analytic DBMS.
- By number, most of an enterprise’s OLTP/general-purpose databases are low-volume and low-value.
- Most interesting new OLTP/general-purpose data management products are either MySQL-based or NoSQL.
- It’s not yet clear whether MySQL will prevail over MySQL forks, or vice-versa, or whether they will co-exist.
- The era of silicon-centric relational DBMS is coming.
- The emphasis on scale-out and reducing the cost of joins spans the NoSQL and SQL-based worlds.
- Users’ instance on “free” could be a major problem for OLTP DBMS innovation.
I shall explain. Read more
Akiban highlights
Akiban responded quickly to my complaints about its communication style, and I chatted for a couple of hours with senior Akiban techies Ori Herrnstadt, Peter Beaman and Jack Orenstein. It’s still early days for Akiban product development, so some details haven’t been determined yet, and others I just haven’t yet pinned down. Still, I know a lot more than I did a day ago. Highlights of my talk with Akiban included: Read more
| Categories: Akiban, MySQL, Object, OLTP, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 4 Comments |
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
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cassandra, Continuent, Google, MySQL, NoSQL, Open source, RDF and graphs, Tokutek and TokuDB | 5 Comments |
Oracle lifts the cloud hanging over MySQL storage engine vendors
Oracle has put out a press release promising to play nicely with MySQL if its Sun takeover is approved. The parts in italics below are quotes. My comments are in plain text.
1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.
MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture shall mean MySQL’s current practice of using, publicly-available, documented application programming interfaces to allow storage engine vendors to “plug” into the MySQL database server. Documentation shall be consistent with the documentation currently provided by Sun.
Well, duh.
2. Non-assertion. As copyright holder, Oracle will change Sun’s current policy and shall not assert or threaten to assert against anyone that a third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL because they have implemented the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
A commercial license will not be required by Oracle from third party storage engine vendors in order to implement the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
Oracle shall reproduce this commitment in contractual commitments to storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun.
This is the biggie, lifting a major cloud from the MySQL storage engine business. It sounds like the third of four options I suggested as to how Oracle could legitimately earn antitrust approval of its MySQL takeover. Sure, Infobright, Kickfire, et al. already had what they saw as adequate safeguards or contingency plans vs. Oracle skullduggery. It’s still big even so.
(Quoted out of order.) The geographic scope of these commitments shall be worldwide and these commitments shall continue until the fifth anniversary of the closing of the transaction.
Not a disaster, but with respect to at least point #2 there should be no time limit whatsoever. I’d like to see the EC require that change as a further Oracle concession. Read more
| Categories: MySQL, Open source, Oracle, Pricing | 17 Comments |
Calpont’s InfiniDB
Since its inception, Calpont has gone through multiple management teams, strategies, and investor groups. What it hadn’t done, ever, is actually shipped a product. Last week, however, Calpont introduced a free/open source DBMS, InfiniDB, with technical details somewhat reminiscent of what Calpont was promising last April. Highlights include:
- Like Infobright, Calpont’s InfiniDB is a columnar DBMS consisting of a MySQL front end and a columnar storage engine.
- Community edition InfiniDB runs on a single server.
- One of commercial/enterprise edition InfiniDB’s main claims to fame will be MPP support.
- There’s no announced time frame for commercial edition InfiniDB.
- InfiniDB’s current compression story is dictionary/token only, with decompression occurring before joins are executed. Improvement is a roadmap item.
- Indeed, InfiniDB has many roadmap items, a few of which can be found here. Also, a great overview of InfiniDB’s current state and roadmap can be found in this MySQL Performance Blog thread. (And follow the links there to find performance discussions of other free analytic DBMS.)
- One thing InfiniDB already has that is still a roadmap item for Infobright is the ability to run a query across multiple cores at once.
- One thing free InfiniDB has that Infobright only offers in its Enterprise Edition is ACID-compliant Insert/Update/Delete. (Note: I wish people would stop saying that Infobright Enterprise Edition isn’t ACID-compliant, since that point was cleared up a while ago.)
- InfiniDB has no indexes or materialized views.
- However, InfiniDB’s retrieval is expedited by something called “Extents,” which sounds a lot like Netezza’s zone maps.
Being on vacation, I’ll stop there for now. (If it weren’t for Tropical Storm/ depression Ida, I might not even be posting this much until I get back.)
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Calpont, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Infobright, MySQL, Open source | 3 Comments |
Infobright notes
I had lunch w/ Bob Zurek and Susan Davis of Infobright today. This wasn’t primarily a briefing, but a few takeaways are:
- Infobright now has >100 paying customers.
- Typical database size is from the low 100s of gigabytes to the low single-digit number of terabytes.
- Agile development is at or approaching two-week release cycles.
- Like Kickfire, Infobright has a multi-year deal with MySQL that insulates it against many potential Oracle/MySQL shenanigans.
- From an industry perspective, Infobright’s customer base sounds a lot like other vendors’:
- Data mart outsourcing/online analytics
- Log files for websites
- Telecommunications
- Financial services
- OEM, especially in the markets cited above
- “Hey, we’re beginning to see the occasional energy deal”
- A few random others
- Infobright is seeing some household-name customers, who surely have big-name analytic DBMS products, but who also have a policy that open source is the default choice, and if open source can get the job done then the favorite closed-source choices aren’t used.
- Infobright has the usual open-source community story — lots of involvement and engagement in the forums, but contributions are limited mainly to connectivity, utility scripts, etc. (Maybe some national language translation too; I’m not sure.)