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Displaying posts with tag: database virtualization (reset)
Why You Should Embrace Database Virtualization

This article addresses the benefits provided from database virtualization. Before we proceed however, it is important to explain that database virtualization does NOT mean simply running a DBMS inside a virtual machine.

Database Virtualization, More Than Running a DBMS in a Virtual Machine While running a DBMS in a VM can provide advantages (and disadvantages) it is NOT database virtualization. Typical databases fuse together the data (or I/O) with the processing (CPU utilization) to operate as a single unit. Simply running that single unit in a VM does not provide the benefits detailed below. That is not database virtualization that is merely server virtualization.
An Example of the Database Virtualization Problem Say you have a database handling banking and I have $10MM in the bank (I wish). Now let’s assume that the bank is busy, so it bursts that database across 3 VM nodes in typical cloud-style.  …

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Why You Should Embrace Database Virtualization

This article addresses the benefits provided from database virtualization. Before we proceed however, it is important to explain that database virtualization does NOT mean simply running a DBMS inside a virtual machine.

Database Virtualization, More Than Running a DBMS in a Virtual Machine While running a DBMS in a VM can provide advantages (and disadvantages) it is NOT database virtualization. Typical databases fuse together the data (or I/O) with the processing (CPU utilization) to operate as a single unit. Simply running that single unit in a VM does not provide the benefits detailed below. That is not database virtualization that is merely server virtualization.
An Example of the Database Virtualization Problem Say you have a database handling banking and I have $10MM in the bank (I wish). Now let’s assume that the bank is busy, so it bursts that database across 3 VM nodes in typical cloud-style.  Now …

[Read more]
Database Virtualization, What it Really Means


This is a response to a blog postby analyst and marketing consultant Curt Monash.


Originally virtualization meant running one operating system in a window inside of another operating system, e.g. running a Linux on a Windows machine using Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare. Then virtualization evolved to mean slicing a single server into many for more granular resource allocation (Curt’s ex uno plures, translated: out of one, many). It has since expanded to include e pluribus unum (from many, one) and e pluribus ad pluribus (from many to many). This is evidenced in the use of the term “virtualization” to create the compound words: server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and now database virtualization.


Server Virtualization: Abstracts the physical …

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Database Virtualization, What it Really Means

This is a response to a blog postby analyst and marketing consultant Curt Monash.

Originally virtualization meant running one operating system in a window inside of another operating system, e.g. running a Linux on a Windows machine using Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare. Then virtualization evolved to mean slicing a single server into many for more granular resource allocation (Curt’s ex uno plures, translated: out of one, many). It has since expanded to include e pluribus unum (from many, one) and e pluribus ad pluribus (from many to many). This is evidenced in the use of the term “virtualization” to create the compound words: server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and now database virtualization.

Server Virtualization: Abstracts the physical (servers), presenting it as a …

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NetworkWorld: How Mozilla keeps its MySQL database tidy

MySQL database management tool ScaleBase virtualizes MySQL database, spreading database load into smaller bite-size chunks As an open source company, Mozilla developers make a lot of different versions of software code each day, and part of Sheeri Cabral’s job to keep track of them all: which ones work, which don’t, how many times they’ve been downloaded, and which have a [...] Read More

Lack of Business Visibility Cripples Traditional SQL DaaS, Drives NewSQL

More and more public cloud companies are moving to managed cloud services to improve their value-add (price premium) and the stickiness of their solution. However, the shift to a database as a service (DaaS) severely reduces the DBAs visibility into the business, thus limiting the ability to hand tune the database to the requirements of the application and the database. The solution is a cloud database that eliminates the hand-tuning of the database, thereby enabling the DBA to be equally effective even with limited visibility into the business and application needs. It is these unique needs, particularly for SQL databases, that is fueling the NewSQL movement.
DBAs traditionally have insight into the company, enabling them to hand tune the database in a collaborative basis with the development team, such as:
1. Performance Trade-offs/Tuning: The database is partitioned and tuned to address business requirements, maximizing performance of …

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Cloud DaaS Managed Service Fuels NewSQL Market

As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation, maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your database software and you were the DBA managing all aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …

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Database Architectures & Performance II

As described in the prior post, the shared-disk performance dilemma is simple:

1. If each node stores/processes data in memory, versus disk, it is much faster.
2. Each node must expose the most recent data to the other nodes, so those other nodes are not using old data.

In other words, #1 above says flush data to disk VERY INFREQUENTLY for better performance, while #2 says flush everything to disk IMMEDIATELY for data consistency.

Oracle recognized this dilemma when they built Oracle Parallel Server (OPS), the precursor to Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). In order to address the problem, Oracle developed Cache Fusion.

Cache fusion is a peer-based shared cache. Each node works with a certain set of data in its local cache, until another node needs that data. When one node …

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Virtual Databases: The Face of the New Cloud Database

Shared-disk databases can be virtualized—making them cloud-friendly—while shared-nothing databases are tied to a specific computer and a specific data set or data partition.

The underlying principle of the shared-nothing RDBMS is that a single master server owns its specific set of data. That data is not shared, hence the name shared-nothing. Because there is no ability to share the data, there is also no ability to virtualize the computing of that data. Instead the shared-nothing RDBMS ties the data and the computing to a specific computer. This association with a physical machine is then reinforced at the application level. Applications leveraging a shared-nothing database, that is partitioned across more than one server, use routing code. Routing code simply directs the various database requests to the servers that own the data being requested. In other words, the application must know which server owns which piece of data. …

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Showing entries 1 to 9