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 | 5 Comments |
MySQL storage engine round-up, with Oracle-related thoughts
Here’s what I know about MySQL storage engines, more or less.
- MySQL with MyISAM is fast. But it’s not transactional. Except for limited purposes, MySQL with MyISAM is a pretty crummy DBMS. Nothing can change that.
- MySQL with InnoDB is transactional. But it’s not particularly fast. MySQL with InnoDB is a pretty mediocre DBMS. Oracle could fix that, at least partially, over time.
- I don’t know much about Falcon, Maria, and so on. With Oracle winding up owning both MySQL and InnoDB, the motivation for those engines (except as Oracle-free forks) might fade.
- Infobright is the most established of the rest. At the moment I’m not recommending it for most industrial-strength uses unless the user is particularly cash-constrained. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that changed soon. A cheap, fast, simple columnar analytic DBMS has a place in the world.
- Kickfire is next in line, offering a hardware-based growth path for users who’ve maxed out on what unaided MySQL can do. It remains to be seen for how many users the desire to keep things simple and stay with MySQL outweighs the desire to avoid custom hardware. Having Oracle salespeople all over those accounts surely wouldn’t help. Kickfire also has a second market, namely OEM vendors who are mainly interested in the superfast chip. That would probably be pretty unaffected by Oracle.
- Tokutek offers a technical proposition that’s hard to match head-on without going the CEP route. Users who care are likely to be MySQL shops. Tokutek’s main challenge is to prove that it sufficiently outdoes competing technical strategies for sufficiently many users. Oracle ownership of MySQL seems pretty irrelevant to Tokutek’s success or failure.
- Calpont offers a kind of lightweight Exadata alternative. With Calpont’s packaging and positioning perennially unclear, it’s difficult to predict the effect of a particular change — i.e., Oracle buying MySQL — in Calpont’s market environment.
- I haven’t heard from transactionally-oriented ScaleDB since I wrote about them a year ago. Apparently, they’re rolling out beta product this week, and their venerable techie guru sadly passed away earlier this month.
| Categories: Calpont, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Exadata, Infobright, Kickfire, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, Tokutek | 13 Comments |
Introduction to Tokutek
Tokutek has a paradoxical pitch: Tokutek writes data particularly quickly, and therefore you’re supposed to buy Tokutek for query-oriented uses. Highlights of the Tokutek story include:
- Tokutek is a MySQL storage engine.
- MySQL/Tokutek writes indexed data a lot faster than B-tree-based alternatives. (The claim is 10s of 1000s of rows per second on a single server.)
- MySQL/Tokutek reads data at B-tree speeds. (But not, I presume, at the speed of specialized analytic DBMS.)
- Tokutek is not yet ACID-compliant. They’re working on that, but we don’t know what the performance implications will be when they achieve it. ACID compliance won’t come as soon as the May release (Tokutek Version 2.0).
- Tokutek has made one sale. Others are in the pipeline.
Tokutek’s initial target market is the usual combination of clickstream/personalization/other network management. The idea is that many data warehouse technologies have trouble getting latency below, say, 15 seconds to 5 minutes, at least at very high update volumes. So if immediacy is more important than raw complex query performance, Tokutek’s performance profile could be attractive. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, MySQL, Tokutek, Web analytics | 10 Comments |