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. …
The primary database architectures—shared-disk and
shared-nothing—each have their advantages. Shared-disk has
functional advantages such as high-availability, elasticity, ease
of set-up and maintenance, eliminates partitioning/sharding,
eliminates master-slave, etc. The shared-nothing advantages are
better performance and lower costs. What if you could offer a
database that is a hybrid of the two; one that offers the
advantages of both. This sounds too good to be true, but it is
fact what ScaleDB has done.
The underlying architecture is shared-disk, but in
many situations it can operate like shared-nothing.
You see the problems with shared-disk arise from the messaging
necessary to (a) ship data among nodes and storage; and (b)
synchronize the nodes in the cluster. The trick is to move the
messaging outside of the transaction so it doesn’t impact
performance. The way to achieve that is to exploit locality. Let …
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 …
ScaleDB is proud to announce the introduction of a database that
takes data storage to a new level, and a new altitude. ScaleDB’s
patent pending “molecular-flipping technology” enables low energy
molecular flipping that changes selected water molecules from H20
to HOH, representing positive and negative states that mimic the
storage mechanism used on hard drive disks.
“Because we act at the molecular level, we achieve massive
storage density with minimal energy consumption, which is
critical in today’s data centers, where energy consumption is the
primary cost,” said Mike Hogan, ScaleDB CEO. “A single thimble of
water vapor provides the same storage capacity as a high-end
SAN.”
The technology does have one small challenge: persistence. Clouds
are not known for their persistence. ScaleDB relies on the
Cumulus formation, since it is far beefier than some of those
wimpy cirrus clouds. However, when deployed …
Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.
Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:
"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …
[Read more]Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.
Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:
"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …
[Read more]Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:
ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.
Slides are online (and downloadable) at http://www.slideshare.net/Sheeri/scale-db-preso-for-boston-my-sql-meetup-92009
Watch the video online at …
[Read more]
In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators'
probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important
class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database
startups. By these I mean:
I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the
sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed
for data warehousing and business intelligence applications.
ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …
By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL.
The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This argument is valid - Sun’s already declining revenue has been in freefall since the deal was announced and one wonders how far it will fall in another 90 days of stasis.
Other criticism, (such as this from Matt Asay) focuses on the suggestion that the delay will do little to help MySQL or its users, and that the EC fails to understand open source.
This also has some …
[Read more]Cloud computing is disrupting many aspects of computing. One need only witness the manner in which online applications like Google Docs and Salesforce.com are disrupting entrenched competitors. Soon, cloud computing will significantly disrupt the database market, for the reasons explained below.
One of the most powerful arguments in technology is the price/performance ratio. Significant declines in price or significant increases in performance can result in disruption. When you get both price declines and performance increases, you get significant disruption. This is exactly what is coming to the database market.
The Past
Moore’s Law enabled the CPU to process data faster than the hard
disk drive could get the data to the CPU. Because getting data to
the CPU was the bottleneck, the database that solved that
bottleneck would have a performance advantage.
The shared-disk database had two glaring …
[Read more]