Clustering
Analysis of products and issues in database clustering. Relates subjects include:
Key questions when selecting an analytic RDBMS
I recently complained that the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse DBMS conflates many use cases into one set of rankings. So perhaps now would be a good time to offer some thoughts on how to tell use cases apart. Assuming you know that you really want to manage your analytic database with a relational DBMS, the first questions you ask yourself could be:
- How big is your database? How big is your budget?
- How do you feel about appliances?
- How do you feel about the cloud?
- What are the size and shape of your workload?
- How fresh does the data need to be?
Let’s drill down. Read more
NuoDB marketing mishegas
I must start by apologizing for giving a quote in a press release whose contents I deplore. Unlike occasions on which I’ve posted about inaccurate quotes, in this case the fault is mine. The quote is quite accurate. And NuoDB didn’t mislead me about the release’s contents; I just neglected to ask.
NuoDB evidently subscribes to the marketing fallacy:
- Big DBMS companies hit people repeatedly with marketing cudgels.
- We want to be a big DBMS company.
- Therefore we will hit people repeatedly with marketing cudgels too.
But to my taste, NuoDB’s worst travesty is not the deafening drumroll before launch (I asked off their mailing list months before), nor the claim that NuoDB’s launch would be a “big day” for the database industry (annoying but ordinary hype), nor the emergent flock of birds foofarah, nor even NuoDB’s overwrought benchmark marketing (distressingly many vendors do that).
Rather, I think NuoDB’s greatest marketing offense to date is its Codd-imitating “12 rules” for cloud database management. Read more
| Categories: Cloud computing, Clustering, NuoDB, Theory and architecture | 9 Comments |
Introduction to NuoDB
NuoDB has an interesting NewSQL story. NuoDB’s core design goals seem to be:
- SQL.
- Transactions.
- Very flexible topology, including:
- Local replicas.
- Remote replicas.
- Easy deployment and management.
| Categories: Cache, Cloud computing, Clustering, Database compression, NewSQL, NuoDB | 5 Comments |
Introduction to GenieDB
GenieDB is one of the newer and smaller NewSQL companies. GenieDB’s story is focused on wide-area replication and uptime, coupled to claims about ease and the associated low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
GenieDB is in my same family of clients as Cirro.
The GenieDB product is more interesting if we conflate the existing GenieDB Version 1 and a soon-forthcoming (mid-year or so) Version 2. On that basis:
- GenieDB has three tiers.
- GenieDB’s top tier is the usual MySQL front-end.
- GenieDB’s bottom tier is either Berkeley DB or a conventional MySQL storage engine.
- GenieDB’s bottom tier stores your entire database at every node.
- If you replicate locally, GenieDB’s middle tier operates a distributed cache.
- If you replicate wide-area, GenieDB’s middle tier allows active-active/multi-master replication.
The heart of the GenieDB story is probably wide-area replication. Specifics there include: Read more
| Categories: Cache, Cloud computing, Clustering, GenieDB, Market share and customer counts, MySQL, NewSQL | 4 Comments |
NewSQL thoughts
I plan to write about several NewSQL vendors soon, but first here’s an overview post. Like “NoSQL”, the term “NewSQL” has an identifiable, recent coiner — Matt Aslett in 2011 — yet a somewhat fluid meaning. Wikipedia suggests that NewSQL comprises three things:
- OLTP- (OnLine Transaction Processing)/short-request-oriented SQL DBMS that are newer than MySQL.
- Innovative MySQL engines.
- Transparent sharding systems that can be used with, for example, MySQL.
I think that’s a pretty good working definition, and will likely remain one unless or until:
- SQL-oriented and NoSQL-oriented systems blur indistinguishably.
- MySQL (or PostgreSQL) laps the field with innovative features.
To date, NewSQL adoption has been limited.
- NewSQL vendors I’ve written about in the past include Akiban, Tokutek, CodeFutures (dbShards), Clustrix, Schooner (Membrain), VoltDB, ScaleBase, and ScaleDB, with GenieDB and NuoDB coming soon.
- But I’m dubious whether, even taken together, all those vendors have as many customers or production references as any of 10gen, Couchbase, DataStax, or Cloudant.*
That said, the problem may lie more on the supply side than in demand. Developing a competitive SQL DBMS turns out to be harder than developing something in the NoSQL state of the art.
Data(base) virtualization — a terminological mess
Data/database virtualization seems to be a hot subject right now, and vendors of a broad variety of different technologies are all claiming to be in the space. A terminological mess has ensued, as Monash’s First and Third Laws of Commercial Semantics are borne out in spades.
If something is like “virtualization”, then it should resemble hypervisors such as VMware. To me:
- The core feature of a hypervisor is that it allows many somethings to run and coexist where ordinarily only one something would come into play. Here the “many somethings” are virtual machines and what’s going on inside them, and the “one something” is the ordinary operating system/hardware computing stack.
- A core feature of original VMware was that the “many somethings” could be quite different — for example, the operating environments of numerous different hardware systems you wanted to decommission, or of new systems that you didn’t want to buy quite yet.
- Important features of hypervisors include:
- The ability to have multiple virtual machines run side by side at once, safely.
- Flexible and powerful workload management if the virtual machines do contend for resources.
- Easy management.
- The negative feature of having sufficiently low overhead.
Anything that claims to be “like virtualization” should be viewed in that light. Read more
| Categories: Clustering, Data integration and middleware, ScaleDB, Theory and architecture, Transparent sharding | 5 Comments |
Couchbase 2.0
My clients at Couchbase checked in.
- After multiple delays, Couchbase 2.0 is well into beta, with general availability being delayed by the holiday season as much as anything else.
- Couchbase (the company) now has >350 subscription customers, almost all for Couchbase (the product) — which is to say for what was known as Membase, which is basically a persistent version of Memcached.
- There also are many users of open source Couchbase, most famously LinkedIn.
- Orbitz is a much-mentioned flagship paying Couchbase customer.
- Couchbase customers mainly seem to be replacing a caching layer, Memcached or otherwise.
- Couchbase headcount is just under 100.
The big changes in Couchbase 2.0 versus the previous (1.8.x) version are:
- JSON storage, including secondary indexes.
- Multi-data-center replication.
- A back-end change from SQLite to a heavily forked version of CouchDB, called Couchstore.
Couchbase 2.0 is upwards-compatible with prior versions of Couchbase (and hence with Memcached), but not with CouchDB.
Technology notes on Couchbase 2.0 include: Read more
| Categories: Basho and Riak, Cache, Cassandra, Clustering, Couchbase, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, MongoDB, NoSQL, Open source, Structured documents | 5 Comments |
Database challenges in multi-tenancy support
I predicted 2 months ago that Oracle 12c would have some kind of improved support for multi-tenancy; Larry Ellison confirmed on this week’s earnings call that it will. So maybe it’s time to think about what such support could or should mean. I’m actually still on vacation, so I’d like to keep this short, but here are a few notes.
- The goal of multi-tenancy is:
- SaaS (Software as a Service) users should get all the flexibility, performance, security, and control they would expect if their SaaS vendor hosted a software instance and database just for them.
- SaaS vendors shouldn’t have to do any more than host a single instance of the application software and a single database.
- In its purest form, that goal is a nice dream.
- Separation-of-access and related security issues are the most obvious requirement of multi-tenancy. However, the simplest ways to meet the requirement stress your SELECT statements. I alluded to that in a post about salesforce.com.
- In a clustered, multi-tenant SaaS database, you want each tenant’s individual database to be properly clustered. Perhaps you want it all on one server. Perhaps you want it striped across the cluster. In any case, your DBMS’ clustering has to be flexible and granular enough to make that possible.
- Caching should also be as good for each tenant as if that tenant had a standalone database.
- Individual tenants need to be able to administer their databases, at least in certain ways, as if they were standalone, or else the SaaS vendor needs to be able to do it for them.
- This is implicit in what I said above about users/roles/permissions, clustering, and caching.
- It really gets interesting when we take into account application customization and the resulting schema changes.
- And before we get too excited about any of this, please note that there are many SaaS vendors in the world doing just fine without explicit DBMS multi-tenancy features.
| Categories: Clustering, Oracle, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 8 Comments |
Integrated internet system design
What are the central challenges in internet system design? We probably all have similar lists, comprising issues such as scale, scale-out, throughput, availability, security, programming ease, UI, or general cost-effectiveness. Screw those up, and you don’t have an internet business.
Much new technology addresses those challenges, with considerable success. But the success is usually one silo at a time — a short-request application here, an analytic database there. When it comes to integration, unsolved problems abound.
The top integration and integration-like challenges for me, from a practical standpoint, are:
- Integrating silos — a decades-old problem still with us in a big way.
- Dynamic schemas with joins.
- Low-latency business intelligence.
- Human real-time personalization.
Other concerns that get mentioned include:
- Geographical distribution due to privacy laws, which for some users is a major requirement for compliance.
- Logical data warehouse, a term that doesn’t actually mean anything real.
- In-memory data grids, which some day may no longer always be hand-coupled to the application and data stacks they accelerate.
Let’s skip those latter issues for now, focusing instead on the first four.
Uninterrupted DBMS operation — an almost-achievable goal
I’m hearing more and more stories about uninterrupted DBMS operation. There are no iron-clad assurances of zero downtime; if nothing else, you could crash your whole system yourself via some kind of application bug. Even so, it’s a worthy ideal, and near-zero downtime is a practical goal.
Uninterrupted database operations can have a lot of different aspects. The two most basic are probably:
- High availability/fail-over. If a system goes down, another one in the same data center is operational almost immediately.
- Disaster recovery. Same story, but not in the same data center, and hence not quite as immediate.
These work with single-server or scale-out systems alike. However, scale-out and the replication commonly associated with it raise additional issues in continuous database operation:
- Eventual consistency. Scale-out and replication create multiple potential new points of failure, server and network alike. Eventual consistency ensures that a single such failure doesn’t take any part of the database down.
- The use of replicas to avoid planned downtime. If you do rolling maintenance, then you can keep a set of servers with the full database up at all times.
Finally, if you really care about uninterrupted operation, you might also want to examine:
- Administrative tools and utilities. The better your tools, the better your chances of keeping your system up. That applies to anything from administrative dashboards to parallel backup functionality.
- Fencing of in-database analytic processes. If you’re going to do in-database analytics, fenced/out-of-process ones are a lot safer than the alternative.
- Online schema changes. If you change a schema in a relational DBMS, that doesn’t necessarily entail taking the database offline.
Let’s discuss some of those points below.