Emulation, transparency, portability

Analysis of products that support the emulation of market-leading database management systems. Related subjects include:

December 5, 2007

Just what does Oracle-compatibility mean?

Quite a bit of DBMS plug-compatibility is being claimed these days. Lewis Cunningham’s post on a few new EnterpriseDB features illustrates just how picky compatibility features can get. One can run Oracle code but not get around to handling comments properly? Sheesh.

October 29, 2007

ParAccel opens the kimono slightly

Please do not rely on the parts of this post that draw a distinction between in-memory and disk-based operation. See our February 18, 2008 post about ParAccel instead. It turns out that communication with ParAccel was yet worse than I had realized.

Officially launched today at the TDWI conference, ParAccel is out to compete with Netezza. Right out of the chute, ParAccel may have surpassed Netezza in at least one area: pointlessly annoying secrecy. (In other regards I love them dearly, but that paranoia can be a real pain.) As best I can remember, here are some things about ParAccel that I both am allowed to say and find interesting:

Read more

October 19, 2007

Webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS Tuesday October 23 12 noon Eastern time

I’m doing another webinar on mid-range OLTP DBMS next Tuesday, at 12 noon Eastern. It’s sponsored by EnterpriseDB, who also sponsored one six months ago on the same subject. Hopefully, this one will be a bit fresher. Sign up today! The expected turnout is humongous.

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October 12, 2007

Three ways Oracle or Microsoft could go MPP

I’ve been arguing for a while that Oracle and Microsoft are screwed in high-end data warehousing. The reason is that they’re stuck with SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) architectures, while Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, and many others enjoy the benefits of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing). Thus, Teradata and DATAllegro boast installations in the hundreds of terabytes each, while Oracle and Microsoft users usually have to perform unnatural acts of hard-coded partitioning even to reach the 10 terabyte level.

That said, there are at least three ways Oracle and/or Microsoft could get out of this technical box:

1. They could buy or just partner with MPP vendors such as Dataupia, who offer plug-compatibility with their respective main DBMS.

2. They could buy whoever they want, plug-compatibility be damned. Presumably, they’d quickly add a light-weight data federation front-end to give the appearance of integration, then merge the products more closely over time.

3. They could develop or buy technology like DATAllegro’s, which essentially federates instances of an ordinary SMP DBMS across nodes of an MPP grid (Greenplum does something similar). I imagine that, for example, ripping Ingres out of DATAllegro and slotting in Oracle instead would be a pretty straightforward exercise; even without dramatic change to any of the optimizations, the resulting port would be something that ran pretty quickly on Day 1.

Bottom line: Oracle and Microsoft are hemorrhaging at the data warehouse high end now. But there are ways they could stanch the bleeding.

September 30, 2007

Calpont finally has a multipage website

Calpont’s website is finally more or less real. It still doesn’t say much except that the company is in alpha test with a Type II appliance, and that the product has a columnar DBMS architecture and Oracle transparency (with DB2) promised. Oh yes; it has 32 employees. The “Customer” tab doesn’t list any customers, but I guess they saved site design money by having it all ready to go when that situation changes.

Philip Howard’s recent article has a lot more meat than that, including the perplexing bit of info that Calpont is starting out with a shared-everything architecture. Based on that, as well as the company’s prior technical efforts, we can probably conclude they’re focused on rather small warehouses.

September 24, 2007

Pervasive Summit PSQL v10

Pervasive Software has a long history – 25 years, in fact, as they’re emphasizing in some current marketing. Ownership and company name have changed a few times, as the company went from being an independent startup to being owned by Novell to being independent again. The original product, and still the cash cow, was a linked-list DBMS called Btrieve, eventually renamed Pervasive PSQL as it gained more and more relational functionality.

Pervasive Summit PSQL v10 has just been rolled out, and I wrote a nice little white paper to commemorate the event, describing some of the main advances over v9, primarily for the benefit of current Pervasive PSQL developers. In one major advance, Pervasive made the SQL functionality much stronger. In particular, you now can have a regular SQL data dictionary, so that the database can be used for other purposes – BI, additional apps, whatever. Apparently, that wasn’t possible before, although it had been possible in yet earlier releases. Pervasive also added view-based security permissions, which is obviously a Very Good Thing.

There also are some big performance boosts. Read more

August 30, 2007

Philip Howard likes Calpont — again

The ratio of Philip Howard plaudits about Calpont to shipping products from Calpont has now doubled. Yet it also has remained the same. This is because it is a countably infinite number, namely a quotient whose denominator is zero. Last time around, he seemed to like their hardware strategy. This time around, he seems to like their lack of a hardware strategy. Be that as it may, the previously discussed nature of Calpont’s website hasn’t changed — one page, content-free, and misleading even so.

Oh, and it appears he broke the embargo on Paraccel. Bad Philip. Spank him, Kim.

July 26, 2007

An era of easier database portability?

More and more, I find myself addressing questions of database portability and transparency, most particularly in the cases of EnterpriseDB, Ants Software, and now also Dataupia. None of those three efforts is very large yet, but so far I’d rate their respective buzzes to be very encouraging in the case of EnterpriseDB, non-discouraging or better in the case of Ants, and too early to judge for Dataupia. On the whole, it definitely seems like a matter worthy of attention.

With that as backdrop, where is all this compatibility/portability/transparency stuff going to lead? Read more

July 26, 2007

Dataupia – low-end data warehouse appliances

It’s unfortunate that Dataupia has concepts like “Utopia” and “Satori” in its marketing, as those serve to obscure what the company really offers – data warehouse appliances designed for the market’s low end. Indeed, it seems that they’re currently very low-end, because they were just rolled out in May and are correspondingly immature.

Basic aspects include:

Beyond price, Dataupia’s one big positive differentiation vs. alternative products is that you don’t write SQL directly to a Dataupia appliance. Rather, you talk to it through the federation capability in your big-brand DBMS, such as Oracle or SQL*Server. Benefits of this approach include: Read more

July 20, 2007

EnterpriseDB has a huge partisan in FTD

The Register has a rip-roaring story on a (currently partial) conversion from Oracle to EnterpriseDB. Basically, FTD is royally pissed-off at Oracle, and EnterpriseDB stepped in with a very fast conversion.

Apparently, FTD decided they needed to Do Something after a Valentine’s Day meltdown, and the project was completed on EnterpriseDB in time for Mother’s Day.

One note of caution: When a user supports a vendor’s marketing this emphatically, it usually has gotten nice breaks on price and/or service. Your mileage may vary. On the other hand, EnterpriseDB is still a small enough company that, if you want them to love you to death, you can be pretty well assured that you’re important enough to them that they’ll do so.

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