July 23, 2010

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

July 17, 2010

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

July 17, 2010

Sybase SQL Anywhere

After Powersoft acquired Watcom and its famed Fortran compiler, marketing VP Tom Herring told me that the hidden jewel of the acquisition might well be a little DBMS, Watcom SQL. To put it mildly, Tom was right. Watcom SQL became SQL Anywhere; Powersoft was acquired by Sybase; Powersoft’s and Sybase’s main products both fell on hard times; Sybase built a whole mobile technology division around SQL Anywhere; and the whole thing just got sold for billions of dollars to SAP. Chris Kleisath recently briefed me on SQL Anywhere Version 12 (released to manufacturing this month), which seemed like a fine opportunity to catch up on prior developments as well.

The first two things to understand about SQL Anywhere is that there actually are three products:

Sybase SQL Anywhere, a mid-range relational DBMS.
Sybase UltraLite, a DBMS for mobile devices.
Sybase MobiLink, a replication/sync tool.

and also that there are three main deployment/use cases:

Generic desktop or server computers. This was the original market for SQL Anywhere.
Laptop/handheld computers. This was the original growth market for SQL Anywhere. In particular, Siebel Systems’ first growth spurt was selling sales force automation software on laptop computers with SQL Anywhere underneath.
Specialized devices. Earlier this decade, Sybase thought SQL Anywhere’s big growth market was on specialized devices. (I recall a video featuring some kind of automated pill dispensing machine for hospitals.)

Categories: Mid-range, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Specific users, Sybase

Breakthrough: Exadata now has as many reference accounts as Aster Data!

According to Bob Evans of Information Week, there now are 15 disclosed Exadata reference accounts. Coincidentally, there are exactly 15 logos on Aster Data’s customer page. So on its own, that’s not a particularly impressive piece of information.

But other highlights of his column include:

Some of those accounts are rather big-name. However, I’m not at all sure whether they’re actual production references.
Andy Mendelsohn characterizes the sweet spot of Exadata’s market as “virtual private cloud.” That matches what Juan Loaiza told me six months ago.
Oracle claims numerous competitive wins for Exadata. Let me hasten to note that one vendor’s “competitive win” is another vendor’s “our salesman read the deal as an unfavorable one and chose not to compete,” or even sometimes “Huh? We never heard about that deal.” That said, what I’m hearing is that Exadata is indeed a much stronger competitor than it used to be.
Oracle claims a near $1 billion sales run rate for Exadata. No doubt, a large majority of those are hardware upgrades for existing Oracle database customers, often from non-Sun/Oracle hardware. Even so, some of those are surely deals that would have migrated away from Oracle in the pre-Exadata past.

Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share and customer counts, Oracle

1 Comment

July 7, 2010

More on Greenplum and EMC

I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:

Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.

Highlights looking forward include: Read more

Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts

7 Comments

July 6, 2010

EMC is buying Greenplum

EMC is buying Greenplum. Most of the press release is a general recapitulation of Greenplum’s marketing messages, the main exceptions being (emphasis mine):

The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year. Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum’s full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.

Greenplum is one of my biggest vendor clients, and EMC is just becoming one, but of course neither side gave me a heads-up before the deal happened, nor have I yet been briefed subsequently. With those disclaimers out of the way, some of my early thoughts include:

I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it’s inevitable.
I don’t think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)
- EMC tends to run its bigger software acquisitions in a fairly hands-off manner. There’s no particular FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) reason why this deal should stop anybody from buying Greenplum software.
- I also don’t think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you’re the type who’s nervous about smaller vendors — well, Greenplum now isn’t so small.
Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.
The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:
- Oracle, with Exadata
- Microsoft, partially
- Teradata
- Netezza
- Now EMC/Greenplum, at least partially
- Weaker players such as:
  - The ailing Kickfire, which a client (not Kickfire itself) tells me is being shopped around
  - The reeling HP Neoview
  - XtremeData, but I’m still waiting to hear of XtremeData’s first real sale
Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that.
Greenplum’s weakness is concurrency.
Greenplum’s “polymorphic storage” is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas.
And finally — I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I’ll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do.

Related links (edit)

Here’s the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware.
Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $3-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct.
Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place.
I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.

Categories: Data warehouse appliances, EMC, Greenplum, Storage

13 Comments

July 6, 2010

Riptano, and Cassandra adoption

Tonight’s Cassandra technology post got plenty long enough on its own, so I’m separating out business and adoption issues here. For starters, known Cassandra users include:

Facebook, which has said it has 150 or so Cassandra nodes (but see below)
Twitter, which has said it has 45 or so Cassandra nodes
Rackspace, which used to be Jonathan Ellis’ employer, and now is backing Cassandra company Riptano
Digg, which along with Twitter and Rackspace was one of the three major users helping advance the Cassandra project
OpenX, Simple Geo, Digital Reasoning, who Jonathan cited as production users in March
Cloudkick, as noted and linked in my other post
Two customers Riptano named at launch (but I’ve forgotten who they were*)

Fetlife, Meebo, and others seem to at least have a healthy interest in Cassandra, based on their level of involvement in a forthcoming Cassandra Summit. That said, the @Fetlife tweetstream features numerous yelps of pain, and I don’t mean the recreational kind. Read more

Categories: Cassandra, DataStax, Facebook, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Pricing, Specific users

5 Comments

July 6, 2010

Cassandra technical overview

Back in March, I talked with Jonathan Ellis of Rackspace, who runs the Apache Cassandra project. I started drafting a blog post then, but never put it up. Then Jonathan cofounded Riptano, a company to commercialize Cassandra, and so I talked with him again in May. Well, I’m finally finding time to clear my Cassandra/Riptano backlog. I’ll cover the more technical parts below, and the more business- or usage-oriented ones in a companion Cassandra/Riptano post.

Jonathan’s core claims for Cassandra include:

Cassandra is shared-nothing.
Cassandra has good approaches to replication and partitioning, right out of the box.
In particular, Cassandra is good for use cases that distribute a database around the world and want to access it at “local” latencies. (Indeed, Jonathan asserts that non-local replication is a significant non-big-data Cassandra use case.)
Cassandra’s scale-out is application-transparent, unlike sharded MySQL’s.
Cassandra is fast at both appends and range queries, which would be hard to accomplish in a pure key-value store.

In general, Jonathan positions Cassandra as being best-suited to handle a small number of operations at high volume, throughput, and speed. The rest of what you do, as far as he’s concerned, may well belong in a more traditional SQL DBMS. Read more