Ideas, releases, practical guides, and perspectives from the people building with MySQL.
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The following is a list of interesting DBMS related links for the week:
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I was speaking with Michael Stonebraker this morning. I mentioned that lately many have been referencing comments he has made over the last couple of years. And I also mentioned that many had interpreted them as he was implying the RDBMS is “doomed”. Mike has been saying the same thing for years, but the current NoSQL movement seems to have picked up on this and highlighting one of the RDBMS's own pioneers is predicting its …
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There will be plenty of detailed coverage on Exadata V2 so I won’t attempt to replicate that. However I do have a couple of initial thoughts which I would like to share. For those who missed it, Oracle has just announced Exadata V2 (which is their pre-built “machine”). Exadata V1 was built using HP equipment, Exadata V2 is using Sun. The main addition to Exadata V2 seems to be an extra tier in the memory hierarchy, a flash cache. Oracle is very quick to point out this is not flash disk, but it is flash memory, Sun’s FlashFire technology (flash disk or SSD’s was always going to be a transition technology, flash memory doesn’t have the …
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I was fortunate enough to speak with Marcin
Zukowski earlier about VectorWise. If you missed it, VectorWise
came out of stealth mode a day or two ago. The have
announced a joint partnership with Ingres and essentially are
claiming impressive analytic RDBMS performance gains on
conventional hardware.
To start with, a key message that I think needs to be communicated here is that this is not a product announcement. Ingres and VectorWise have announced a partnership in which they of course plan to build products together, today those products are still in the works.
VectorWise is a spin out of CWI based on research that was undertaken by Marcin and others, research …
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I spoke to Daniel Abadi this morning about his HadoopDB announcement that came out a couple
of days back. I am sure this has been a busy time for
Daniel and his team over in Yale as HadoopDB has been getting a
lot of interest which I am sure will continue to build.
Some notes from our discussion:
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A while ago, about 16 years ago now, I had a desktop computer. It wasn’t a PC. It was an Acorn. It had an ARM processor in it. Despite the rest of the world starting going crazy for the new Pentium chip, the Acorn with its ARM processor could run rings about it in terms of computing power. And it was simple and easy to use, I used to write applications in assembly code for it (and it didn't have a fan!).
Not too long after that Acorn went under, Arm was already off on its own to find a new market. Its …
[Read more]Forrester put out its Enterprise Data Management Q2 2009 report a few days ago, you can buy it from Forrester but it also seems to now be available for free from Microsoft here. I don’t actively seek out these reports as they usually just re-enforce common knowledge (this one was no exception), however as it turned up I managed to find some time on the weekend for a quick read through.
Few surprises in this report, but some key mentions are:
(yeah, this company is going to have to get used to the Austin Powers references.)
Groovy Corp put out a press release last night that starts the official launch of their SQL Switch relational database platform.
I have been speaking with Groovy for a few months, and while the press release is a bit noisy there is actually some interesting stuff in it.
First, an overview
Recently on a number of sites the benefits for and against have been debated with, on occasion, these conversations falling into abuse being thrown in both directions.
From a pure technical perspective, the TPC benchmarks make little sense and are probably not relevant to 99% of organizations looking to implement a database technology. But as a tool for generating visibility, debate and improved public awareness of a vendors technology they still have an impact.
This is marketing, pure and simple. Having a great TPC result is akin to an author having a great review on Amazon. Doesn’t mean it is relevant for you but if faced with a stack of titles you haven’t yet read you’ll probably look more closely at the ones you’ve heard something positive about.
TPC’s are a tool for the marketing department, just the same as any other form of …
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BI/Data Warehousing is an easier market to enter for new database platform vendors. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, most BI deployments are custom built projects for each organization. This means the ability to pick and choose various layers of the stack is much greater.
Secondly, BI/DW projects success/failure metrics are often tied to database platform driven properties – performance, scalability, load times etc. The ability to stray outside any existing database platform “standards” to choose a platform that better meets key metrics is more tolerable.
Thirdly, because the ratio of BI to OLTP is low, the associated impact of violating a corporate standard is much lower. With OLTP …
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