January 24th, 2013 — Data management
SAS. SAP. Actuate. Guavus. Cirro. ACID. And more.
And that’s the Data Day, today.
January 22nd, 2013 — Uncategorized
DataStax and VoltDB launch their version 3.0s. And more
And that’s the Data Day, today.
January 10th, 2013 — Data management
451 Research’s 2013 Database survey is now live at http://bit.ly/451db13 investigating the current use of database technologies, including MySQL, NoSQL and NewSQL, as well as traditional relation and non-relational databases.
The aim of this survey is to identify trends in database usage, as well as changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle, and the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other databases, including NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.
There are just 15 questions to answer, spread over five pages, and the entire survey should take less than ten minutes to complete.
All individual responses are of course confidential. The results will be published as part of a major research report due during Q2.
The full report will be available to 451 Research clients, while the results of the survey will also be made freely available via a
presentation at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April.
Last year’s results have been viewed nearly 55,000 times on SlideShare so we are hoping for a good response to this year’s survey.
One of the most interesting aspects of a 2012 survey results was the extent to which MySQL users were testing and adopting PostgreSQL. Will that trend continue or accelerate in 2013? And what of the adoption of cloud-based database services such as Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL?
Are the new breed of NewSQL vendors having any impact on the relational database incumbents such as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM? And how is SAP HANA adoption driving interest in other in-memory databases such as VoltDB and MemSQL?
We will also be interested to see how well NoSQL databases fair in this year’s survey results. Last year MongoDB was the most popular, followed by Apache Cassandra/DataStax and Redis. Are these now making a bigger impact on the wider market, and what of Basho’s Riak, CouchDB, Neo4j, Couchbase et al?
Additionally, we have been tracking attitudes to Oracle’s ownership of MySQL since the deal to acquire Sun was announced. Have MySQL users’ attitudes towards Oracle improved or declined in the last 12 months, and what impact will the formation of the MariaDB Foundation have on MariaDB adoption?
We’re looking forward to analyzing the results and providing answers to these and other questions. Please help us to get the most representative result set by taking part in the survey at http://bit.ly/451db13
August 23rd, 2012 — Data management
MetaScale. Spark. Actuate and VoltDB. And more.
And that’s the Data Day, today.
April 11th, 2012 — Data management
February 24th, 2012 — Data management
February 14th, 2012 — Data management
January 13th, 2012 — Data management
July 11th, 2011 — Data management
It has been fascinating to watch how the industry has responded to ‘NewSQL’ since we published our first report using the term.
From day one the term has taken on a life of its own as the vendors such as ScaleBase, VoltDB, NimbusDB and Xeround have picked it up and run with it , while the likes of Marten Mickos and Michael Stonebraker have also adopted the term.
The reaction hasn’t been all positive, of course, although much of the criticism has been of the “are you kidding?” or “this is getting silly” variety rather than constructive debate about either the term or the associated technologies.
Another popular response is along the lines of “does this mean the end of NoSQL?”. I think it is important to address this question because it depends on a common misunderstanding about technology: that in order for the latest technology to succeed it is necessary for the technology that immediately preceded it to fail.
While our report into NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond identified common drivers for interest in NoSQL and NewSQL databases, as well as data caching/grid technologies, in truth there is a significant difference between the requirements for databases that provide relaxed consistency and/or schema dependency and those that retain the ACID properties of transactional database systems.
Although there will be isolated examples, it is going to be rare, therefore, that any potential adopter would be directly comparing NoSQL and NewSQL technologies unless they are still at the stage trying to figure out the level of consistency required for an individual application.
The other option they would have is to use an existing SQL database, particularly Oracle’s MySQL, which provides the middle ground that overlaps both NoSQL and NewSQL. A significant number of the NoSQL deployments we have identified have migrated from MySQL, while existing MySQL deployments (although probably not the same ones) are also targets for the numerous NewSQL vendors.
VoltDB is a primary example, as last’s week’s GigaOm article covering CTO Michael Stonebraker’s view on Facebook’s MySQL ‘fate worse than death’ illustrated.
Much debate (125 comments at last count) has followed Stonebraker’s assertion that Facebook would be better off migrating to a NewSQL offering like VoltDB, most of which has not supported his view.
There’s a good reason for that. There is a good argument to be made that if you were trying to create Facebook from scratch today you probably wouldn’t choose the shard management overhead involved in MySQL. In that regard, Stonebraker has a point.
However, the fact is that MySQL was pretty much the only logical choice when Facebook began and its commitment to MySQL has grown over the years. The company is now probably one of the world’s experts in scaling and managing MySQL – to the extent that Facebook engineer Domas Mituzas argues that the operational overhead in handling sharding and availability of MySQL has become a constant cost.
Under those circumstances it would take something significant for a company like Facebook to even consider migrating to a MySQL alternative. Database migration projects are costly and complex and extremely rare – even at non-Facebook scale.
And it is not as if the company hasn’t experimented with other database technologies – having created Apache Cassandra and adopted Apache HBase for its Messages update.
This is exactly the polyglot persistence strategy we are seeing from NoSQL and NewSQL adopters: retaining MySQL (or another SQL database) where is makes sense to do so, while adding NoSQL and perhaps NewSQL for new projects and applications for which it is appropriate.
One other point to note, however, is that adopting a NewSQL technology might not require migrating away from MySQL. While the NewSQL category includes new database products such as VoltDB, it also includes alternative MySQL storage engines and database load balancing and clustering products such as ScaleBase and ScalArc, which are specifically designed to improve the scalability of MySQL (with other SQL databases to come) in order to avoid migration to an alternative database.
Adoption of these technologies does not require the complete abandonment of ‘standard MySQL’ any more than the adoption of NoSQL for non-ACID application requirements does, and it certainly doesn’t require the abandonment of NoSQL.
April 20th, 2011 — Data management
As we noted last week, necessity is one of the six key factors that are driving the adoption of alternative data management technologies identified in our latest long format report, NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.
Necessity is particularly relevant when looking at the history of the NoSQL databases. While it is easy for the incumbent database vendor to dismiss the various NoSQL projects as development playthings, it is clear that the vast majority of NoSQL projects were developed by companies and individuals in response to the fact that the existing database products and vendors were not suitable to meet their requirements with regards to the other five factors: scalability, performance, relaxed consistency, agility and intricacy.
The genesis of much – although by no means all – of the momentum behind the NoSQL database movement can be attributed to two research papers: Google’s BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, presented at the Seventh Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, in November 2006, and Amazon’s Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store, presented at the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, in October 2007.
The importance of these two projects is highlighted by The NoSQL Family Tree, a graphic representation of the relationships between (most of) the various major NoSQL projects:
Not only were the existing database products and vendors were not suitable to meet their requirements, but Google and Amazon, as well as the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, PowerSet and Zvents, could not rely on the incumbent vendors to develop anything suitable, given the vendors’ desire to protect their existing technologies and installed bases.
Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, has explained that as far as Amazon was concerned, the database layer required to support the company’s various Web services was too critical to be trusted to anyone else – Amazon had to develop Dynamo itself.
Vogels also pointed out, however, that this situation is suboptimal. The fact that Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon have had to develop and support their own database infrastructure is not a healthy sign. In a perfect world, they would all have better things to do than focus on developing and managing database platforms.
That explains why the companies have also all chosen to share their projects. Google and Amazon did so through the publication of research papers, which enabled the likes of Powerset, Facebook, Zvents and Linkedin to create their own implementations.
These implementations were then shared through the publication of source code, which has enabled the likes of Yahoo, Digg and Twitter to collaborate with each other and additional companies on their ongoing development.
Additionally, the NoSQL movement also boasts a significant number of developer-led projects initiated by individuals – in the tradition of open source – to scratch their own technology itches.
Examples include Apache CouchDB, originally created by the now-CTO of Couchbase, Damien Katz, to be an unstructured object store to support an RSS feed aggregator; and Redis, which was created by Salvatore Sanfilippo to support his real-time website analytics service.
We would also note that even some of the major vendor-led projects, such as Couchbase and 10gen, have been heavily influenced by non-vendor experience. 10gen was founded by former Doubleclick executives to create the software they felt was needed at the digital advertising firm, while online gaming firm Zynga was heavily involved in the development of the original Membase Server memcached-based key-value store (now Elastic Couchbase).
In this context it is interesting to note, therefore, that while the majority of NoSQL databases are open source, the NewSQL providers have largely chosen to avoid open source licensing, with VoltDB being the notable exception.
These NewSQL technologies are no less a child of necessity than NoSQL, although it is a vendor’s necessity to fill a gap in the market, rather than a user’s necessity to fill a gap in its own infrastructure. It will be intriguing to see whether the various other NewSQL vendors will turn to open source licensing in order to grow adoption and benefit from collaborative development.
NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond is available now from both the Information Management and Open Source practices (non-clients can apply for trial access). I will also be presenting the findings at the forthcoming Open Source Business Conference.
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