May 8th, 2008 Curt Monash
In which we bring you another instantiation of Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics: Bad jargon drives out good.
When Enterprise DB announced a partnership with Truviso for a “blade,” I naturally assumed they were using the term in a more-or-less standard way, and hence believed that it was more than a “Barney” press release.* Silly me. Rather than referring to something closely akin to “datablade,” EnterpriseDB’s “blade” program turns out to just to be a catchall set of partnerships.
*A “Barney” announcement is one whose entire content boils down to “I love you; you love me.”
According to EnterpriseDB CTO Bob Zurek, the main features of the “blade” program include:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data types, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Open source RDBMS, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, Specialized data management in general | 3 Comments »
April 29th, 2008 Curt Monash
Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:
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There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.
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Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.
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If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics and analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Complex event/stream processing (CEP), Data types, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Games and virtual worlds, Memory-centric data management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Specialized data management in general, Truviso | 1 Comment »
April 10th, 2008 Curt Monash
As previously announced, I did a webcast this afternoon, discussing database diversity. The title of the talk was taken directly from a post – What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize — that argued mid-range DBMS are suitable for a broad variety of tasks. The overriding theme was a Clayton Christensen-style “disruption” narrative.
The sponsor was EnterpriseDB, which is fitting. While not the biggest DBMS industry disrupter in terms of revenue or visible impact (MySQL and Netezza say “Hi”), the Postgres family in general and EnterpriseDB in particular epitomize the disruption threat like nobody else, because of how broadly they substitute for market-leading database managers.
As I promised on the call, below is a post with links to further research backing up the points made. They’re numbered to match some of the presentation slides, which you can find at this link.
3. Much of the discussion of database diversity comes from a series of posts I coordinated with Mike Stonebraker.
4. At various times, starting on Slide 4, I made reference to datatype extensibility, a key feature of Oracle and DB2 – and a key advantage of Postgres over MySQL.
10. Capping off the database diversity discussion, Slide 10 mirrors this 11-point version of a data management software taxonomy.
13-14. I’ve posted many times about data warehousing DBMS and related technologies, including this overview of major analytic DBMS products, another recent overview of data warehouse specialty technologies, and an attempt to distinguish between data warehouse appliance myths and realities. Of particular interest for further research may be our sections on data warehouse appliances and columnar DBMS.
15. I do most of my posting about text search over on Text Technologies, specifically in the search category. Vendors I specifically mentioned as blending search with other kinds of data retrieval were Mark Logic and Attivio.
16. There’s a section here on native XML database management.
17. We also have a section on managing RDF and other graphical data models.
18. Ditto complex event/stream processing.
19. The only embeddable DBMS I’ve written much about recently is solidDB. And frankly, even in that case I’ve focused more on mid-tier caching uses, the now-canceled MySQL relationship, or general technology than I did specifically on embedded uses.
22-24. Back in February, 2007 I made what is probably still my clearest post explaining why I think market-leading DBMS vendors are in the process of getting disrupted.
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Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | No Comments »
March 25th, 2008 Curt Monash
EnterpriseDB is making a series of moves and announcements. Highlights include:
- Renaming/repositioning the product as “Postgres Plus.” The free product is now Postgres Plus, while the version you pay EnterpriseDB for is now Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
- Repackaging the products, so that Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a strict superset of Postgres Plus.
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New features added to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
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Features newly migrated from Advanced Server down to Postgres Plus.
- A strategic investment by IBM.
- Stressing Postgres in EnterpriseDB marketing, and dropping the tag-line defining themselves as “the Oracle-compatible database company.”
So far as I can tell, most of the technical differences between Advanced Server and regular Postgres Plus lie in three areas: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Cache, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 1 Comment »
March 6th, 2008 Curt Monash
The relational DBMS industry is filled with startups. In some way or other, most of them are based on or make use of the open source project PostgreSQL. (Not all, of course; exceptions include DATAllegro and Infobright, which are based on Ingres and MySQL respectively.) But how they use PostgreSQL varies greatly. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Greenplum, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, Vertica Systems | 9 Comments »
February 5th, 2008 Curt Monash
The Register reports on PostgreSQL 8.3, and emphasizes OLTP speedups and reductions in administrative burden:
Among the changes, Heap Only Tuples (HOT) that may cut the maintenance overhead of frequently updated tables by up to 75 per cent, spread checkpoints and background writer autotuning to reduce the impact of check points on response times, and an asynchronous commit option that also speeds the response times of certain transactions.
I wonder how EnterpriseDB compares on these features.
Edit: Slashdot has discussion and links. And here’s a PostgreSQL feature matrix.
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range DBMS, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment »
January 28th, 2008 Curt Monash
And here’s the biggie.
Question of the day #3
What complex, high-volume transactional applications have actually been built in mid-range DBMS such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, FileMaker, or EnterpriseDB?
I’ve been flamed for suggesting that MySQL or FileMaker aren’t fully equal to Oracle and DB2 in supporting hard-core transactional applications. (Which is ironic, because I’ve also been flamed for suggesting hard-core transactional support isn’t as big a deal for DBMS selection as some relational purists insist. But I digress …) So I’m putting the question out there — what impressive transactional applications do the stand-alone mid-range DBMS actually support? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, FileMaker, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 20 Comments »
January 24th, 2008 Curt Monash
I may argue for the use of open source and other mid-range database management systems, but a lot of industry sentiment remains on the other side. Vendors of high-end RDBMS naturally advocate enterprise-wide single-vendor adoption. Many CIOs and industry analysts, overwhelmed by product proliferation, think that’s a neat idea as well.
And in fairness, they’re not entirely wrong. Here are 14 reasons for using high-end relational database management systems, even on applications for which mid-range DBMS would suffice. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Microsoft and SQL*Server, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 17 Comments »
January 22nd, 2008 Curt Monash
For very high-end applications, the list of viable database management systems is short. Scalability can be a problem. (The rankings of most scalable alternatives differ in the OLTP and data warehouse realms.) Extreme levels of security can be had from only a few DBMS. (Oracle would have you believe there’s only one choice.) And if you truly need 99.99% uptime, there only are a few DBMS you even should consider.
But for most applications at any enterprise – and for all applications at most enterprises – super high-end DBMS aren’t required. There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. Ingres and Progress OpenEdge aren’t far behind (they’re a little lacking in datatype support). Ditto Intersystems Cache’, although the nonrelational architecture will be off-putting to many. And to varying degrees, you can also do fine with MySQL, Pervasive PSQL, MaxDB, or a variety of other products – or for that matter with the cheap or free crippled versions of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix.
What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Intersystems and Cache', Microsoft and SQL*Server, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, Pervasive Software, PostgreSQL, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Relational database management systems, SAP, BI Accelerator, and MaxDB | 14 Comments »
January 16th, 2008 Curt Monash
More from me soon, but first here is a survey of what other people are saying about Sun’s billion-dollar deal to acquire MySQL:
- Jeremy Cole, evidently a very experienced high-end MySQL user, itemizes some serious problems with MySQL — optimizer, memory management, replication, and so on. (Uh, Jeremy — what part of the product do you like?) He also echoes a theme I’ve seen elsewhere, and to some extent noticed myself; MySQL has had a lot of management issues as a company.
- Jeffrey McManus calls out Sun’s promise to continue to support non-Java programming languages in MySQL. Kaj Arnö of MySQL makes the point emphatically, reciting a list of operating systems and development environments/languages MySQL will continue to support.
- Matt Asay quite reasonably interprets Sun’s move as a bid for overall leadership and development of the open source software platform industry. I would add that Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz came up through the software side of the business. I would further add that Sun has a dismal track record with closed-source software acquisitions, including Forte’, NetDynamics, and the enterprise side of Netscape.
- Matt also has selected quotes from the press conference, including Sun saying the coopetitionally obvious “Yeah, we’ll continue serious support for PostgreSQL and Oracle too.” Brian Aker also supports the PostgreSQL point.
- Zack Urlocker of MySQL implies that Jonathon Schwartz was very involved in the deal personally. That makes all kinds of sense.
- 451 Group has some interesting links, and don’t miss the short comment thread.
- The official MySQL and Sun company lines are summarized in this Zack Urlocker post on Infoworld (as well as some of the links above) and this post from Jonathon Schwartz of Sun.
Posted in MySQL, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 2 Comments »
January 10th, 2008 Curt Monash
If you’re interested in the world of mid-range, OLTP, and/or open source database management systems, Derek Rodner’s blog is worth checking out. His 2007 Year in Review post deserves a look — even though it’s about as unbiased and spin-free as Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, in that combines multiple shots each at Oracle and MySQL with some plugs for EnterpriseDB. I’ve already praised his post a month ago listing large numbers of EnterpriseDB successes. Of course there are multiple heartfelt arguments on behalf of Postgres (too many to link to specifically). And he even has a great set of tips — which I hereby recommend to all my vendor clients — on how best to use Google AdWords.
Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Mid-range DBMS, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2007 Curt Monash
Elastra is a startup offering MySQL and PostgreSQL SaaS instances in the Amazon S3/EC2 cloud. On their board is John Hummer, which I generally regard as a good thing, although it’s hardly a guarantee of success.* High Scalability raises some doubts about Elastra’s pricing, but I think that may be missing the point. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Amazon, SimpleDB, and S3, Cloud computing, Elastra, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, SaaS | 2 Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is:
- Extending Netezza’s SQL via user-defined functions (which probably wasn’t too hard, especially since the Netezza engine is related to PostgreSQL).
- Providing a C-to-Verilog compiler.
- Providing an application development environment and associated tools. (Presumably rather primitive, but I haven’t really checked it out.)
The applications mentioned in the NDN press release, and I quote directly, are:
- Multi-dimensional geospatial analytics on comprehensive data sets for risk management
- Predictive model scoring for customer segmentation, enabling real-time offer provisioning for customers
- Iterative modeling and analytics on billions of call detail records (CDRs) for telco price optimization
- Real-time Monte Carlo simulations on terabytes of detail-level data for risk management
- “Fingerprinting” with hashing algorithms for chain-of-custody document fingerprinting and to ensure that files transferred are intact
- Fuzzy text search analysis uses algorithms that provide a “best guess” of most likely results
Netezza says that the greatest interest has come from usual-suspect sophisticated users, specifically intelligence agencies and perhaps also financial services firms. But naturally, the partners actually trotted out at Netezza’s user conference were mainly hopeful small-company ISVs. The biggest stir was made by not-so-small SAS, which evidently believes this new capability will provide massive improvements to SAS/Netezza combined performance.
In principle, there are four different ways this new programmability could be a big win: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Native XML, Netezza, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems, SAS Institute, Specialized data management in general | 8 Comments »
June 7th, 2007 Curt Monash
StreamBase is a decently-established startup, possibly the largest company in its area. Truviso, in the process of changing its name from Amalgamated Insight, has a dozen employees, one referenceable customer, and a product not yet in general availability. Both have ambitious plans for conquering the world, based on similar stories. And the stories make a considerable amount of sense.
Both companies’ core product is a memory-centric SQL engine designed to execute queries without ever writing data to disk. Of course, they both have persistence stories too — Truviso by being tightly integrated into open-source PostgreSQL, StreamBase more via “yeah, we can hand the data off to a conventional DBMS.” But the basic idea is to route data through a whole lot of different in-memory filters, to see what queries it satisfies, rather than executing many queries in sequence against disk-based data. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Complex event/stream processing (CEP), Memory-centric data management, PostgreSQL, StreamBase, Truviso | 8 Comments »
March 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
Like Greenplum, EnterpriseDB is a PostgreSQL-based DBMS vendor with an interesting story, whose technical merits I don’t yet know enough to judge. In particular, CEO Andy Astor:
- Confirms that EnterpriseDB is OLTP-focused, unlike Greenplum. That said, they are also used for some reporting and so on. But they don’t run 10s-of-terabytes sized data marts.
- Claims EnterpriseDB has a high level of Oracle compatibility – SQL, datatypes, stored procedures (so that would be PL/SQL too), packages, functions, etc.
- Claims ANTs isn’t nearly as Oracle-compatible.
- Claims 50-100% better OLTP performance out of the box than vanilla PostgreSQL, due to auto-tuning.
Also, EnterpriseDB has added a bunch of tools to PostgreSQL – debugging, DBA, etc. And it provides actual-company customer support, something that seems desirable when using a DBMS. It should also be noted that the product is definitely closed-source, notwithstanding EnterpriseDB’s open-source-like business model and its close ties to the open source community.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ANTs Software, Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, Mid-range DBMS, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL | No Comments »
March 13th, 2007 Curt Monash
I talked with Greenplum honchos Bill Cook and Scott Yara yesterday. Bill is the new CEO, formerly head of Sun’s field operations. Scott is president, and in effect the marketing-guy co-founder. I still don’t know whether I really believe their technical story. But I do think I have a feel for what they’re trying to do. Key aspects of the Greenplum strategy include:
- Greenplum rewrote a lot of PostgreSQL to parallelize it, in the correct belief that MPP is the best way to go for high-end data warehousing.
- Indeed, Greenplum claims to have a general solution to DBMS parallelization. Unlike Netezza, DATallegro, Vertica, and Kognitio, Greenplum offers a row-oriented data store with a fairly full set of indexing techniques. You want star indices or bitmaps? They have them. (They even claimed to be used for some text management when last we talked, although that was for O’Reilly and Mark Logic seems to be O’Reilly’s main text-indexing vendor.)
- Greenplum’s main sales strategy is to be part of Sun’s product line, bundled into Thumper boxes as single-part-number Sun offerings. They certainly could add other hardware OEMs, just like Checkpoint sells firewalls through multiple appliance vendors. But at least for now it’s all about Sun.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 1 Comment »
February 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
Most of what I’ve written lately about database management seems to have been focused on analytic technologies. But I have a lot to say on the OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) side too. So let’s start by clearing the decks. Here’s a list of some consensus views that I in essence agree with:
- Oracle is the top of the line, and has nothing wrong with it other than cost of ownership and the non-joys of doing business with Oracle Corporation.
- DB2/mainframe is a fine product, but only if you like IBM mainframes.
- DB2/open systems is another fine product, but it’s hard to think of reasons to use it over Oracle.
- Microsoft SQL Server has great cost of ownership if you’re a Windows (server) shop anyway, especially on the administrative side. It does most but not all of what Oracle does.
- Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise is a lot like SQL Server, but without the Windows dependence or the great Microsoft tools. If you have it installed or are Chinese, you should strongly consider using it, but otherwise there are better alternatives.
- Progress’ DBMS is great if you don’t need any of the features it’s missing. Administration, for example, is a super-low-cost breeze. But why use it unless you’re also using the Progress development tools?
- Intersystems’ Cache’ is another fine mid-range product that involves buying into the vendors’ whole tool set – all the more so because it isn’t relational.
- Small-footprint embedded DBMS, from vendors such as Sybase’s iAnywhere division or Solid Information Technologies, are off in their own little world. Mainly, that world is telecom, with a satellite in medical devices, although other kinds of networked equipment also sometimes use these products.
- IBM’s non-DB2 database management products – IMS, Informix, etc. – are fine things to stick with until you have to change. Ditto products from Software AG, Computer Associates, Cincom, etc.
- MySQL Version 4 is an OLTP joke, but it’s a joke many people share. (Hey — a lot of blogs, including mine, run on Wordpress and MySQL 4.)
- Until Ingres is meaningfully marketed and sold outside its installed base, it’s not worth worrying about.
- PostgreSQL is more significant as the underpinning of other products — mainly EnterpriseDB in the OLTP space — than it is in its own right.
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Posted in EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Intersystems and Cache', Microsoft and SQL*Server, Mid-range DBMS, MySQL, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Products and vendors, Progress, Apama, and DataDirect, Relational database management systems, solidDB | 1 Comment »
January 27th, 2007 Curt Monash
PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB is attracting a bit of attention. Philip Howard, as he does of most products, takes a favorable view. Seth Grimes regards the company as dirty, rotten liars. The company suggests that Everquest gameplay* runs on an RDBMS. I find this inherently implausible, and hence am starting out with a skeptical view of the company’s marketing messages.
*As in character movement. The idea that character inventory is stored in an RDBMS I find vastly more credible. Ditto other less volatile aspects of character state.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ANTs Software, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Games and virtual worlds, Mid-range DBMS, OLTP database management, Open source RDBMS, Oracle, Portability, transparency, and plug-compatibility, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 3 Comments »
August 12th, 2006 Curt Monash
Netezza relies on FPGAs. DATallegro essentially uses standard components, but those include Infiniband cards (and there’s a little FPGA action when they do encryption). Greenplum, however, claims to offer a highly competitive data warehouse solution that’s so software-only you can download it from their web site. That said, their main sales mode seems to also be through appliances, specifically ones branded and sold by Sun, combining Greenplum and open source software on a “Thumper” box. And the whole thing supposedly scales even higher than DATallegro and Netezza, because you can manage over a petabyte if you chain together a dozen of the 100 terabyte racks.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Greenplum, Ingres, Netezza, Open source RDBMS, PostgreSQL, Relational database management systems | 3 Comments »