If you are interested in NoSQL databases (or maybe not) perhaps you have seen the anonymous "warning" about using MongoDB.   It concludes with the following pious request:

  Please take this warning seriously.

Now there are a lot of great resources about data management on the web but the aforementioned rant is not one of them.  If you plan to write technical articles and have people take them seriously, here are a few tips.

Sign your name.  Readers are more impressed when they see you are not afraid to stand behind your words. 

Explain what problem you were trying to solve.  Otherwise uncharitable readers might think you just started pumping information into a new database without thinking about possible consequences and now

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Join me for a webinar where I discuss how the recent changes and trends in big data management effect the enterprise.  This event is sponsored by Red Rock and RockSolid.

Overview:

It is an exciting and interesting time to be involved in data. More change of influence has occurred in the database management in the last 18 months than has occurred in the last 18 years. New technologies such as NoSQL & Hadoop and radical redesigns of existing technologies, like NewSQL , will change dramatically how we manage data moving forward. 

These technologies bring with them possibilities both in terms of the scale of data

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As you probably know, I have been doing RDBMS work for many years, some 25+ years by now. At Recorded Future I am the database architect, and although an RDBMS is used extensively, MySQL in this case, we are looking at options, and are currently doing more and more work using a NoSQL Solution, probably te most popular one by now, namely MongoDB.

And before you complan: NoSQL is not a good term, but someone with a longer NoSQL background should then find something better, not yours truly. And for all intents and purposes, you know what I am talking about, right?

I plan to post a few MongoDB posts here, how it looks like from an RDBMS dudes (like myself) POV. This is the first installment, but there will be more. I should also point out that I am no expert in NoSQL technologies in general, nor specifically in MongoDB, but I am trying, and our



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Proof-of-concept Tungsten support for MongoDB arrived last May, when I posted about our hackathon effort to replicate from MySQL to MongoDB.  That code then lay fallow for a few months while we worked on other things like parallel replication, but the period of idleness has ended.  Earlier this week I checked in fixes to Tungsten Replicator to add one-line installation support for MongoDB slaves.

MySQL to MongoDB replication will be officially supported in the Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5 build, which will be available in a few weeks.  However, you can try out MySQL to

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Often I think about challenges that organizations face with “Big Data”.  While Big Data is a generic and over used term, what I am really referring to is an organizations ability to disseminate, understand and ultimately benefit from increasing volumes of data.  It is almost without question that in the future customers will be won/lost, competitive advantage will be gained/forfeited and businesses will succeed/fail based on their ability to leverage their data assets.

It may be surprising what I think are the near term challenges.  Largely I don’t think these are purely technical.  There are enough wheels in motion now to almost guarantee that data accessibility will continue to improve at pace in-line with the increase in data volume.  Sure, there will continue to be lots of interesting innovation with technology, but

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Reading yesterday that the NSA has submitted a proposal to Apache to incubate their Accumulo platform.  This, according to the description, is a key/value store built over Hadoop which appears to provide similar function to HBase except it provides “cell level access labels” to allow fine grained access control.  This is something you would expect as a requirement for many applications built at government agencies like the NSA.  But this also is very important for organizations in health care and law enforcement etc where strict control is required to large volumes of privacy sensitive data.

An interesting part of this is how it highlights the acceptance of Hadoop.

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We don’t pay enough attention to Hadoop.

By “we” I mean DBAs, the rest of the world is paying plenty of attention to Hadoop. Recently, I started asking my customers and fellow DBAs about Hadoop adoption in their company. Turns out that many of them have Hadoop. Hadoop shows up in large companies and small ones, in established industries and in startups. Its everywhere.

The way Hadoop shows up in all companies, and the way DBAs don’t pay Hadoop much attention, reminds me a lot of how MySQL started showing up in the enterprise. It didn’t start by DBAs showing up one morning and telling their managers:
“There’s this new open source database. Its not as stable as Oracle and it doesn’t have all the features we need, but man – its going to save us tons of money, and its pretty simple to manage.”

Nope,

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MySQL Cluster* is one of the most advanced and scalable databases available today and, despite what its name might suggest, it is also a brilliant NoSQL database**.
Let me discuss this statement!
First, let’s discuss the high level issues that NoSQL databases try to address:-     Scalability. Traditional RDBMS technology was designed four decades ago, and is not appropriate for today’s Big Data requirements. Database systems today need to be able to scale horizontally over multiple machines to handle millions of users. As the CAP theorem states, it is not possible to achieve availability, scalability and consistency in one system. Several NoSQL databases sacrifice consistency for availability and scalability. -     RDBMS has a rigid data model. Once a


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Just wanted to record for the history books that:


drizzle> select js_eval('var d = new Date(); "Drizzle started running JavaScript at: " + d;')\g
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| js_eval('var d = new Date(); "Drizzle started running JavaScript at: " + d;') |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Drizzle started running JavaScript at: Mon Aug 29 2011 00:23:31 GMT+0300 (EEST) |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.001792 sec)


I will push this onto launchpad tomorrow, after a good nights sleep and final code cleanups.

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A friend recently bought a GM car. I proceeded to inform him that I am shorting GM stock (technically a put option). He was shocked. “But they make great cars,” he exclaimed. I responded, “I’m not shorting the cars, I’m shorting the company.” Why am I recounting this exchange? Because I believe that the new wave of NoSQL companies—as opposed to the rebranded ODBMS—presents the same situation. I am long the products, but short the companies.
Let me explain. NoSQL companies have built some very cool products that solve real business problems. The challenge is that they are all open source products serving niche markets. They have customer funnels that are simply too small to sustain the companies given their low conversion/monetization rates.
These companies could certainly be tasty acquisition targets for companies that actually make money. But as standalone

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I just uploaded my slides from my Open DB Camp / Froscon talk to Slideshare:

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Speaking of conferences, in general, and OpenSQLCamps in particular, there is one a week from now, and I will be speaking! It is organized as a single room track at Froscon, Germany, by Felix Schupp (Blackray/Softmethod) and Volker Oboda (Primebase). The content is mostly a collection of database related talks originally submitted via the main Froscon call for papers. (In other words, unlike many previous camps, the schedule is all set.)

I'm a little excited about this one, because for the first time in my career as speaker I will be giving the keynote. The title of my talk is

How I learned to use SQL and how I learned not to use it

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Conor O'Mahony over at IBM wrote a good post on a favorite topic of mine “The Future of the NoSQL, SQL, and RDBMS Markets”.  If this is of interest to you then I suggest you read his original post.  I replied in the comments but thought I would also repost my reply here.

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Hi Connor, I wish it was as simple as SQL & RDBMS is good for this and NoSQL is good for that.  For me at least, the waters are much muddier than that.

The benefit of SQL & RDBMS is

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