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 |
Netezza nails April Fool’s Day
Netezza has nailed April Fool’s Day this year. 🙂 (Their site will revert to normal after April 1, so I may later edit this post accordingly.)
Related links
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Fun stuff, Humor, Netezza | Leave a Comment |
Quick news, links, comments, etc.
Some notes based on what I’ve been reading recently: Read more
Akiban (formerly Akiba) has a video out
Edit: Akiban has reached out to me after this post and told me a number of my guesses about them are wrong. Stay tuned.
Further edit: I’ve now posted again about Akiban, this time based on actually talking with the company.
Stealth company Akiba has renamed itself Akiban and posted what they call a “five-minute” video.* Apparently, the idea is to improve analytic query performance by denormalizing your data structure. I have no idea how this is different from denormalizing your data model in your existing DBMS, but I’ll admit to fast forwarding through the slides rather than listening to whatever the audio said.
*It’s actually 7:59 long, but who said DBMS developers should ever be believed about anything to do with schedules?
I do know one favorable thing about Akiban/Akiba, which is that Dan Weinreb is or was involved with them in some kind of angel/advisory capacity. Beyond that, all I know is that they’re in the analytic DBMS business, they’ve posted a video, they’re located in the Boston area, and they probably want people to believe that their extreme stealthiness is a sign of self-importance.
Well, there’s also what one can see on LinkedIn.
| Categories: Akiban, Analytic technologies, Data warehousing | 3 Comments |
Some business trends in the data warehouse market
In recent conversations with various analytic DBMS vendors, a fairly consistent picture has emerged.
- Business is strong. Multiple vendors claim to be going gangbusters, with the happy sounds coming out of Vertica and Infobright being echoed by several competitors. Hearsay suggests some other companies in related businesses are doing well too. Depending on who you talk to, the business pickup dates back to Q4, give or take a quarter.
- Oracle Exadata has become a formidable competitor, on the strength of Exadata 2. Exadata 2’s positioning and perception among Oracle users seem to be pretty much in line with what Oracle portrayed to me.
- Teradata is portrayed as a weak competitor. Competitors don’t worry about Teradata nearly as much as they do about Oracle. That said, I suspect a bit of wishful thinking; Teradata is clearly still getting a lot of business the other vendors would dearly love to have.
- HP Neoview is reeling. (Almost) nobody sees Neoview competitively. The Walmart Neoview installation is said to have stayed small at best. JP Morgan Chase is said to have completely thrown Neoview out (and a bunch of HP engineers with it).
- (Almost) nobody mentions competing against DB2 either. This continues to baffle me.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Exadata, HP and Neoview, IBM and DB2, JPMorgan Chase, Market share and customer counts, Oracle, Teradata | 4 Comments |
Vertica update
I caught up with Jerry Held (Chairman) and Dave Menninger (VP Marketing) of Vertica for a chat yesterday. The immediate reason for the call was that a competitor had tipped me off to the departure of Vertica CEO Ralph Breslauer, which of course raises a host of questions. Highlights of the call included:
- Vertica had a “killer” Q4 and is doing very well in Q1 again.
- Vertica burned hardly any cash last year; i.e., it was close to cash-flow neutral in 2009.
- Vertica is hiring aggressively, e.g., in sales.
- Vertica is well down the path with several CEO candidates who Jerry regards as outstanding. He is hopeful there will be a new CEO in April. (But I bet that would be late April, given what Jerry mentioned about his own travel plans.)
- Absent a full-time CEO, Jerry and Andy Palmer are spending a lot more time with Vertica.
- One Vertica customer is approaching a petabyte of user data. The last time Vertica had checked, that customer had been more in the ¼ petabyte range.
- Other multi-hundred terabyte Vertica databases were mentioned, including one where Vertica claims to have beaten Teradata and perhaps other competitors in a head-to-head competition (it sounds like that one’s too recent to be deployed yet).
- Vertica sees Aster and Greenplum competitively more often than it sees ParAccel.
- Vertica sees Sybase IQ competitively a lot in financial services (in new-name accounts for Sybase as well as where some kind of Sybase DBMS is an incumbent), and more occasionally in other sectors.
NDA parts of the conversation also gave me the impression that Vertica is moving forward just as eagerly as its peers. I.e., I didn’t uncover any reason to think that Ralph’s departure is a sign of trouble, of the company being shopped, etc. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, Investment research and trading, Market share and customer counts, ParAccel, Petabyte-scale data management, Sybase, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments |
Infobright blog update
I often offer that, if a company puts up a sufficiently good blog post, I’ll link to it. Well, I just noticed that Infobright CEO Mark Burton (somewhere along the way he seems to have dropped the “interim”) put up an excellent post last month.
Highlights on the market share/sector side include: Read more
| Categories: Columnar database management, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehousing, Infobright, Log analysis, Market share and customer counts, Open source, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
XtremeData update
I talked with Geno Valente of XtremeData tonight. Highlights included:
- XtremeData still hasn’t sold any dbX stuff (they’ve had a side business in generic FPGA-based boards paying the bills for years). Well, there may have been some paid POCs (proofs of concept) or something, but real sales haven’t come through yet.
- XtremeData does have three prospects who have said “Yes”, and expects one order to come through this month.
- XtremeData continues to believe it shines when:
- Data models are complex
- In particular, there are complex joins
- In particular, two large tables have to be joined with each other, under circumstances where no product can avoid doing vast data redistribution
- XtremeData insists that all the nice things Bill Inmon – including in webinars — has said about it has not been for pay or other similar business compensation. That’s quite unusual.
- XtremeData is coming out with a new product, codenamed the Personal Data Warehouse (PDW), which:
- Is ready to go into beta test
- Should be launched in a month and a half or so
- Will have a different name when it is launched
Naming aside, Read more
Memcached-based company NorthScale launches
NorthScale, a start-up based around memcached, has just launched, two weeks after the Todd Hoff’s post arguing the MySQL/memcached combo is passe’. NorthScale wouldn’t necessarily argue with Todd, arguing that what you really should use instead is NorthScale’s combo of memcached and Membase, a memcached-like DBMS …
… or something like that. I don’t intend to write seriously about NorthScale until I have a better idea of what Membase is.
In the mean time,
- VentureBeat put up a solid post on NorthScale’s company history and so on
- Om Malik bought into the NorthScale memcached pitch
- TechCrunch has a low-quality post about NorthScale (although it wasn’t as error-riddled as the same author’s post about nStein, which Seth Grimes properly blasted)
| Categories: Cache, Clustering, Couchbase, memcached, NoSQL, Parallelization | Leave a Comment |