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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
[Read more]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
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 …
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. …
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 …
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. …