May 1, 2014

MemSQL update

I stopped by MemSQL last week, and got a range of new or clarified information. For starters:

On the more technical side: Read more

November 8, 2013

Comments on the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems

The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems is out. “Operational” seems to be Gartner’s term for what I call short-request, in each case the point being that OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) is a dubious term when systems omit strict consistency, and when even strictly consistent systems may lack full transactional semantics. As is usually the case with Gartner Magic Quadrants:

Anyhow:  Read more

April 14, 2013

Introduction to Deep Information Sciences and DeepDB

I talked Friday with Deep Information Sciences, makers of DeepDB. Much like TokuDB — albeit with different technical strategies — DeepDB is a single-server DBMS in the form of a MySQL engine, whose technology is concentrated around writing indexes quickly. That said:

*For reasons that do not seem closely related to product reality, DeepDB is marketed as if it supports “unstructured” data today.

Other NewSQL DBMS seem “designed for big data and the cloud” to at least the same extent DeepDB is. However, if we’re interpreting “big data” to include multi-structured data support — well, only half or so of the NewSQL products and companies I know of share Deep’s interest in branching out. In particular:

Edit: MySQL has some sort of an optional NoSQL interface, and hence so presumably do MySQL-compatible TokuDB, GenieDB, Clustrix, and MemSQL.

Also, some of those products do not today have the transparent scale-out that Deep plans to offer in the future.

Read more

January 5, 2013

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:

I think that’s a pretty good working definition, and will likely remain one unless or until:

To date, NewSQL adoption has been limited.

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.

Read more

July 19, 2012

A data distribution idea at Vertica and Clustrix

Yesterday I wrote:

Clustrix has one cool idea I haven’t heard from anybody else, which I’m calling index distribution. The idea is that each index can be distributed differently across the cluster …  i.e. on different distribution keys. Clustrix thinks that paying special attention to index distribution and movement is helpful to the performance of distributed joins.

While that’s true, I thought I’d heard something similar from Vertica; so I checked, and indeed I had. Vertica famously lets you store columns in different sort orders, in both reasonable senses:

It turns out those columns can also be distributed on different keys as well.

Related link

July 18, 2012

Clustrix 4.0 and other Clustrix stuff

It feels like time to write about Clustrix, which I last covered in detail in May, 2010, and which is releasing Clustrix 4.0 today. Clustrix and Clustrix 4.0 basics include:

The biggest Clustrix installation seems to be 20 nodes or so. Others seem to have 10+. I presume those disaster recovery customers have 6 or more nodes each. I’m not quite sure how the arithmetic on that all works; perhaps the 125ish count of nodes is a bit low.

Clustrix technical notes include: Read more

July 15, 2011

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:

Continuing with that discussion of DBMS alternatives:

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.

August 26, 2010

More on NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)

Since posting last Wednesday morning that I’m looking into NoSQL and HVSP, I’ve had a lot of conversations, including with (among others):

Read more

August 18, 2010

I’m collecting data points on NoSQL and HVSP adoption

I was asked to do a magazine article on NoSQL, where by “NoSQL” is meant “whatever they talk about at NoSQL conferences.” By now the number of publications planning to run the article is up to 2, the deadline is next week and, crucially, it has been agreed that I may talk about HVSP in general, NoSQL and SQL alike.

It also is understood that, realistically, I can’t be expected to know and mention the very latest news for all the many products in the categories. Even so, I think this would be fine time to check just where NoSQL and HVSP adoption stand. Here is most of what I know, or links to same; it would be great if you guys would contribute additional data in the comment thread.

In the NoSQL area:  Read more

May 12, 2010

The Clustrix story

After my recent post, the Clustrix guys raised their hands and briefed me. Takeaways included:    Read more

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