Schooner Information Technology
Analysis and discussion of Schooner Information Technology and the Schooner appliances.
Transparent relational OLTP scale-out
There’s a perception that, if you want (relatively) worry-free database scale-out, you need a non-relational/NoSQL strategy. That perception is false. In the analytic case it’s completely ridiculous, as has been demonstrated by Teradata, Vertica, Netezza, and various other MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) analytic DBMS vendors. And now it’s false for short-request/OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) use cases as well.
My favorite relational OLTP scale-out choice these days is the SchoonerSQL/dbShards partnership. Schooner Information Technology (SchoonerSQL) and Code Futures (dbShards) are young, small companies, but I’m not too concerned about that, because the APIs they want you to write to are just MySQL’s. The main scenarios in which I can see them failing are ones in which they are competitively leapfrogged, either by other small competitors – e.g. ScaleBase, Akiban, TokuDB, or ScaleDB — or by Oracle/MySQL itself. While that could suck for my clients Schooner and Code Futures, it would still provide users relying on MySQL scale-out with one or more good product alternatives.
Relying on non-MySQL NewSQL startups, by way of contrast, would leave me somewhat more concerned. (However, if their code is open sourced. you have at least some vendor-failure protection.) And big-vendor scale-out offerings, such as Oracle RAC or DB2 pureScale, may be more complex to deploy and administer than the MySQL and NewSQL alternatives.
| Categories: Clustering, IBM and DB2, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Open source, Oracle, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, dbShards and CodeFutures | 2 Comments |
Schooner pivots further
Schooner Information Technology started out as a complete-system MySQL appliance vendor. Then Schooner went software-only, but continued to brag about great performance in configurations with solid-state drives. Now Schooner has pivoted further, and is emphasizing high availability, clustered performance, and other hardware-agnostic OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) features. Fortunately, Schooner has some interesting stuff in those areas to talk about.
The short form of the SchoonerSQL (as Schooner’s product is now called) story goes roughly like this:
- SchoonerSQL replicates data — synchronously if the replication target is local, asynchronously if it is remote.
- Local synchronous replication provides high availability; remote asynchronous replication provides disaster recovery.
- SchoonerSQL’s local synchronous replication also provides read scale-out.
- Schooner has a partnership with Code Futures/dbShards to provide write scale-out via transparent sharding.
- SchoonerSQL has some secret sauce in replication performance. This has the effect of significantly increasing write performance (assuming you were going to replicate anyway), because otherwise you might have to slow down the master server’s write performance so that the slaves can keep up with it.
- Schooner believes it still has some single-server performance advantages as well.
| Categories: Clustering, MySQL, OLTP, Oracle, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, dbShards and CodeFutures | 3 Comments |
Defining NoSQL
A reporter tweeted: ”Is there a simple plain English definition for NoSQL?” After reminding him of my cynical yet accurate Third Law of Commercial Semantics, I gave it a serious try, and came up with the following. More precisely, I tweeted the bolded parts of what’s below; the rest is commentary added for this post.
NoSQL is most easily defined by what it excludes: SQL, joins, strong analytic alternatives to those, and some forms of database integrity. If you leave all four out, and you have a strong scale-out story, you’re in the NoSQL mainstream. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, MarkLogic, MySQL, Object, Open source, Petabyte-scale data management, Schooner Information Technology, dbShards and CodeFutures | 6 Comments |
Oracle NoSQL is unlikely to be a big deal
Alex Williams noticed that there will be a NoSQL session at Oracle OpenWorld next week, and is wondering whether this will be a big deal. I think it won’t be.
There really are three major points to NoSQL.
- Dynamic schemas. This is the only one of the three that truly depends on NoSQL.
- Scale-out short-request processing. If you want to scale out efficiently at high request volumes, you’re best off not using all the flexibility SQL/relational DBMS offer. (In particular, you don’t want to do cross-node joins). Not coincidentally, a number of the best scale-out offerings were built to be NoSQL.
- Open source. Doing a relational DBMS is a big project. It seems easier to build NoSQL ones.
Oracle can address the latter two points as aggressively as it wishes via MySQL. It so happens I would generally recommend MySQL enhanced by dbShards, Schooner, and/or dbShards/Schooner, rather than Oracle-only MySQL … but that’s a detail. In some form or other, Oracle’s MySQL is a huge player in the scale-out, open source, short-request database management market.
So that leaves us with dynamic schemas. Oracle has at least four different sets of technology in that area:
- As Workday noticed years ago, MySQL can be used as a functional, basic key-value store.
- Oracle also has XML-based Berkeley DB/SleepyCat kicking around.*
- The XML extensions to Oracle’s core DBMS could be alleged to have a dynamic schema/NoSQL flavor. (Blech.)
- A dynamic schema argument could also be made for object-oriented DBMS technology. While Oracle doesn’t to my knowledge exactly sell that, it does have the Tangosol Coherence line of technology, with a potentially similar programming model.
If Oracle is now refreshing and rebranding one or more of these as “NoSQL”, there’s no reason to view that as a big deal at all.
*That’s Mike Olson’s former company, if you’re keeping score at home.
| Categories: MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Object, Open source, Oracle, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, Structured documents | 11 Comments |
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:
- Facebook et al. are in effect Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, not enterprise technology users. In particular:
- They have the technical chops to rewrite their code as needed.
- Unlike packaged software vendors, they’re not answerable to anybody for keeping legacy code alive after a rewrite. That makes migration a lot easier.
- If they want to write different parts of their system on different technical underpinnings, nobody can stop them. For example …
- … Facebook innovated Cassandra, and is now heavily committed to HBase.
- It makes little sense to talk of Facebook’s use of “MySQL.” Better to talk of Facebook’s use of “MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding.” That said:
- It’s hard to see why somebody today would use MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding for a new project. At least one of Couchbase or transparently-sharded MySQL is very likely a superior alternative. Other alternatives might be better yet.
- As noted above in the example of Facebook, the many major web businesses that are using MySQL + memcached + non-transparent sharding for existing projects can be presumed able to migrate away from that stack as the need arises.
Continuing with that discussion of DBMS alternatives:
- If you just want to write to the memcached API anyway, why not go with Couchbase?
- If you want to go relational, why not go with MySQL? There are many alternatives for scaling or accelerating MySQL — dbShards, Schooner, Akiban, Tokutek, ScaleBase, ScaleDB, Clustrix, and Xeround come to mind quickly, so there’s a great chance that one or more will fit your use case. (And if you don’t get the choice of MySQL flavor right the first time, porting to another one shouldn’t be all THAT awful.)
- If you really, really want to go in-memory, and don’t mind writing Java stored procedures, and don’t need to do the kinds of joins it isn’t good at, but do need to do the kinds of joins it is, VoltDB could indeed be a good alternative.
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.
Notes on short-request scale-out MySQL
A press person recently asked about:
… start-ups that are building technologies to enable MySQL and other SQL databases to get over some of the problems they have in scaling past a certain size. … I’d like to get a sense as to whether or not the problems are as severe and wide spread as these companies are telling me? If so, why wouldn’t a customer just move to a new database?
While that sounds as if he was asking about scale-out relational DBMS in general, MySQL or otherwise, short-request or analytic, it turned out that he was asking just about short-request scale-out MySQL. My thoughts and comments on that narrower subject include(d) but are not limited to: Read more
Updating our vendor client disclosures
From time to time, I disclose our vendor client lists. Another iteration is below. To be clear:
- This is a list of Monash Advantage members.
- All our vendor clients are Monash Advantage members, unless …
- … we work with them primarily in their capacity as technology users. (A large fraction of our user clients happen to be SaaS vendors.)
- We do not usually disclose our user clients.
- We do not usually disclose our venture capital clients, nor those who invest in publicly-traded securities.
- Included in the list below are two expired Monash Advantage members who haven’t said they will renew, as mentioned in my recent post on analyst bias. (You can probably imagine a couple of reasons for that obfuscation.)
With that said, our vendor client disclosures at this time are:
- Aster Data
- Cloudera
- CodeFutures/dbShards
- Couchbase
- EMC/Greenplum
- Endeca
- IBM/Netezza
- Infobright
- Intel
- MarkLogic
- ParAccel
- QlikTech
- salesforce.com/database.com
- SAND Technology
- SAP/Sybase
- Schooner Information Technology
- Skytide
- Splunk
- Teradata
- Vertica
The Continuent Tungsten MySQL replication story
To the consternation of its then-CEO, I wrote very little about my then-client Continuent. However, when I knew Schooner’s recent announcement was coming, I reached out to other MySQL scale-out vendors too. I’ve already posted accordingly about CodeFutures (the dbShards guys) and ScaleBase. Now it’s late-responding Continuent’s turn.
Actually, what I’m mainly going to do is quote a very long email that Continuent’s current CEO/former CTO Robert Hodges sent me, and which I lightly edited. Read more
| Categories: Continuent, Data integration and middleware, MySQL, Open source, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, dbShards and CodeFutures | 9 Comments |
Schooner — flash-based, now software-only, and very fast
Last October I wrote about Schooner Information Technology, which made flash-based appliances, for MySQL, memcached, or persistent memcached. Schooner sold those appliances to close to 20 customers, but even so decided software-only was a better way to go.
Schooner’s core value proposition is that one Schooner box with flash does the job of a lot of MySQL or NoSQL boxes with hard drives. Highlights of the Schooner story — of which you can find more detail at the Schooner website — now include: Read more
| Categories: Clustering, MySQL, OLTP, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory, memcached | 3 Comments |
Quick introduction to Schooner Information Technology appliances
Back in August I talked with John Busch of Schooner Information Technology, which has a non-obvious URL. Schooner Information Technology sells Flash-based appliances that are mainly intended to run MySQL with blazing write performance.
This is one of those cases in which I warned that due to my September wave of family health issues I would cut a few blogging corners, so:
- I’m only going to write about the MySQL aspect, even though Schooner has a memcached product and claims to be able to run other NoSQL stuff as well.
- I’m not going to dig for company information beyond recalling:
- Schooner said that it has invested $20 million in R&D.
- Schooner’s appliances are resold by IBM.
- Schooner also has a direct sales force.
- One flagship customer had 30 TB of data on 17 Schooner nodes.
If Schooner wants to add some of what I’ve left out into the comments to this post, that would be great.
Schooner appliances are meant to be clustered, Read more
| Categories: MySQL, OLTP, Parallelization, Schooner Information Technology, Solid-state memory, memcached | 4 Comments |