June 8, 2014

Optimism, pessimism, and fatalism — fault-tolerance, Part 2

The pessimist thinks the glass is half-empty.
The optimist thinks the glass is half-full.
The engineer thinks the glass was poorly designed.

Most of what I wrote in Part 1 of this post was already true 15 years ago. But much gets added in the modern era, considering that:

And so there’s been innovation in numerous cluster-related subjects, two of which are:

Distributed database consistency

When a distributed database lives up to the same consistency standards as a single-node one, distributed query is straightforward. Performance may be an issue, however, which is why we have seen a lot of:

But in workloads with low-latency writes, living up to those standards is hard. The 1980s approach to distributed writing was two-phase commit (2PC), which may be summarized as:  Read more

June 3, 2012

Introduction to Cloudant

Cloudant is one of the few NoSQL companies with >100 paying subscription customers. For starters:

Company demographics include:

The Cloudant guys gave me some customer counts in May that weren’t much higher than those they gave me in February, and seem to have forgotten to correct the discrepancy. Oh well. The latter (probably understated) figures included ~160 paying customers, of which:

The largest Cloudant deployments seem to be in the 10s of terabytes, across a very low double digit number of servers.

Read more

February 1, 2012

Couchbase update

I checked in with James Phillips for a Couchbase update, and I understand better what’s going on. In particular:

Read more

January 18, 2012

Notes from the Couch blogs

Couchbase in general, and CouchDB project founder Damien Katz in particular, are to some extent walking away from CouchDB. That is:

Even so:

The story unfolded in a bombshell post by Damien, and clarification follow-ups by Damien and by Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. The meatiest of the three was probably Damien’s follow-up, in which he said, among other things:
Read more

August 13, 2011

Couchbase business update

I decided I needed some Couchbase drilldown, on business and technology alike, so I had solid chats with both CEO Bob Wiederhold and Chief Architect Dustin Sallings. Pretty much everything I wrote at the time Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase (the company) still holds up. But I have more detail now. 😉

Context for any comments on customer traction includes:

That said,

Membase sales are concentrated in five kinds of internet-centric companies, which in declining order are: Read more

February 8, 2011

Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase

Membase, the company whose product is Membase and whose former company name is Northscale, has merged with CouchOne, the company whose product is CouchDB and whose former name is Couch.io. The result (product and company) will be called Couchbase. CouchDB inventor Damien Katz will join the Membase (now Couchbase) management team as CTO. Couchbase can reasonably be regarded as a document-oriented NoSQL DBMS, a product category I not coincidentally posted about yesterday.

In essence, Couchbase will be CouchDB with scale-out. Alternatively, Couchbase will be Membase with a richer programming interface. The Couchbase sweet spot is likely to be:  Read more

February 7, 2011

Notes on document-oriented NoSQL

When people talk about document-oriented NoSQL or some similar term, they usually mean something like:

Database management that uses a JSON model and gives you reasonably robust access to individual field values inside a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) object.

Or, if they really mean,

The essence of whatever it is that CouchDB and MongoDB have in common.

well, that’s pretty much the same thing as what I said in the first place. 🙂

Of the various questions that might arise, three of the more definitional ones are:

Let me take a crack at each.  Read more

November 29, 2010

Document-oriented DBMS without joins

When I talked with MarkLogic’s Ken Chestnut about MarkLogic 4.2, I was surprised to learn that MarkLogic really, truly doesn’t do anything like a join. Unlike some other non-SQL DBMS, MarkLogic has no SQL interface, no ODBC or JDBC. Nothing, nada. (MarkLogic has a Java interface for Xquery, but not for anything like SQL.)

Read more

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

April 22, 2009

Clearing some of my buffer

I have a large number of posts still in backlog.  For starters, there are ones based on recent visits with Aster, Greenplum, Sybase, Vertica, and a Very Large User.  I suspect I’ll write more soon on Oracle as well.  Plus there’s my whole future-of-online-media area.  And quite a bit more will grow out of planned research.

So there are a whole lot of other worthy subjects I doubt I’ll be getting to any time soon.  In some cases, of course, other people are doing great jobs of writing about same. Here are pointers to a few links that I am glad to recommend:

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