November, 2008
This week is a REALLY good time to actively strengthen the MySQL forkers
As my first three posts on the Oracle/Sun merger suggested, I think Oracle will do a better job with MySQL product development than Sun has.聽 But of course that’s a low hurdle.聽 And so it leaves open the questions:
What should and/or will be the most widely adopted code lines of MySQL (or other open source DBMS),
especially for the types of users and vendors who are engaged with MySQL (as opposed to principal alternative PostgreSQL) today?
As much as I’ve bashed MySQL/MyISAM and MySQL/InnoDB for being low-quality general-purpose DBMS, I’d still hate to see MySQL-based development stall out. There are a number of MySQL engine providers with rather unique technology, that deserve a good front-end partner to build their products with.聽 The high-volume... Read more
It
… unless you think that is inherently an oxymoron. I thought I was doing well catching and expanding on a clever pop culture reference. But the folks at columnar DBMS start-up Vertica Systems may have topped that with their slogan
The tables have turned
Ouch.... Read more
Big stuff coming from DATAllegro
In the literal sense, that is. While the details on what I wrote about this a few weeks ago* are still embargoed, I’m at liberty to drop a few more hints.
*Please also see DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost’s two comments added today to that thread.
DATAllegro systems these days basically consist of Dell servers talking to EMC disk arrays, with Cisco Infiniband to provide fast inter-server communication without significant CPU load. Well, if you decrease the number of Dell servers per EMC box, and increase the number of disks per EMC box, you can slash your per-terabyte price (possibly at the cost of lowering performance).
Note: Actual per-terabyte numbers, when available, are likely to refer to “user data.” I.e., they are calculated after compression. So ... Read more
Mike Stonebraker on database compression
In my opinion, the key part of Mike Stonebraker’s fascinating note on data compression was (emphasis mine):
The standard wisdom in most row stores is to use block compression. Hence, a storage block is compressed using a single technique (say Lempel-Ziv or dictionary). The technique chosen then compresses all the attributes in all the columns which occur on the block. In contrast, Vertica compresses a storage block that only contains one attribute. Hence, it can use a different compression scheme for each attribute. Obviously a compression scheme that is type-specific will beat an implementation that is “one size fits all”.
It is possible for a row store to use a type-specific compression scheme. However, if there are 50 attributes in a record, then it must remembe... Read more
I don
I posted suggesting that substantial elements of the MySQL community should throw their weight behind MySQL forks. Mike Olson of Cloudera helpfully pointed out, on Twitter and by email, how the GPL could appear to stand in the way of such an effort. But would it really?
Currently, any version of the MySQL code that isn’t proprietary to the MySQL company — which is owned by Sun and hence expected to be owned soon by Oracle — is covered by GPL 2. That license states (emphasis mine):
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted,
Hence it is hard for me to see how the MySQL company could in any way hinder another software vendor fr... Read more
Even Robin Bloor can get snookered once in a while
Robin Bloor is one of the best analysts around — which doesn’t say much about his eponymous firm, since he no longer works there, but I digress. Even so, he evidently got snookered by a Truviso spokesperson, as evidenced by this article.
Apparently, Truviso convinced him that other CEP firms execute one query at a time, while Truviso executes a bunch of queries at once. Well, the latter part of that is presumably true, but it’s hardly the big differentiatior for Truviso Robin would have one believe. That’s what everybody else — StreamBase, Coral8, Progress Apama, et al. — do too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Truviso had a somewhat different architecture for doing it (each vendor describes its approach in rather different language), or even ... Read more
Memory-centric data management whitepaper
I have finally finished and uploaded the long-awaited white paper on memory-centric data management.
This is the project for which I origially coined the term “memory-centric data management,” after realizing that the prevalent “in-memory DBMS” creates all sorts of confusion about how and whether data persists on disk. The white paper clarifies and updates points I have been making about memory-centric data management since last summer. Sponsors included:
Applix, vendors of in-memory/memory-centric MOLAP tool TM1
Progress Software, vendors of ObjectStore, an OODBMS that has more impressive references in-memory or otherwise memory-centric than it does in classical disk-based configurations, and also of the Apama stream processing products
... Read more
MySQL miscellany
For a guy who doesn’t go to the MySQL conference and routinely gets flamed by the MySQL community for being insufficiently adoring of their beloved product, I sure have been putting up a lot of MySQL-related posts recently. Here’s another, zooming through a few different topics.
MySQL 5.4 was announced this week.聽 The highlights seem to be the lifting of a sharp limit on the number of cores MySQL can use, and better optimization for subqueries.聽 Both of these were areas of sharp technical competition between Oracle and Sybase in the mid-1990s; along with row-level locking and the general bugginess of Sybase Release 10, they are a huge part of the reason Oracle left Sybase in the dust in 1995-6.聽 These advances probably get MySQL to about the state of the art of sec... Read more
Should the Oracle/MySQL combo face antitrust opposition?
Oracle is a powerhouse in database management systems, but it’s hardly a monopolist. IBM revels in contriving figures that show it to have market share comparable to Oracle’s, and Microsoft has a very solid position as well.聽 Smaller players like Teradata, Sybase, and MySQL are also thriving. And of course there’s a whole wave of newer DBMS companies, from Netezza on, showing that the DBMS industry isn’t even the secure oligopoly it appeared to be earlier this decade.
However, it’s certainly legitimate to define a product category of “real” DBMS that includes everything from MySQL on up, but not Microsoft Access and other low-end data management products.聽 In that universe, while MySQL is a trivial addition to Oracle’s revenue, it&#... Read more
What
It’s been quite a while since anything substantive-sounding emerged from Calpont. They now have an odd one-page web site, with essentially no substance other than a tagline suggesting they’re shipping product (not bloody likely) and the names, titles, and email addresses of the president and seven vice-presidents. Only two of those officers were listed on the May, 2006 version of the site. Does anybody have an idea what may or may not be going on?
(Quick refresher: Calpont was developing a SQL processing chip, and designing an appliance around it. Whether this appliance would have disks or be all in-memory changed from time to time, a flexibility that was made possible by the apparent fact that none of these boxes actually shipped.)... Read more
