January, 2009
Just what does Oracle-compatibility mean?
Quite a bit of DBMS plug-compatibility is being claimed these days. Lewis Cunningham’s post on a few new EnterpriseDB features illustrates just how picky compatibility features can get. One can run Oracle code but not get around to handling comments properly? Sheesh.... Read more
The Netezza Developer Network
Netezza has officially announced the Netezza Developer Network. Associated with that is a set of technical capabilities, which basically boil down to programming user-defined functions or other capabilities straight onto the Netezza nodes (aka SPUs). And this is specifically onto the FPGAs, not the PowerPC processors. In C. Technically, I think what this boils down to is:
Extending Netezza’s SQL via user-defined functions (which probably wasn’t too hard, especially since the Netezza engine is related to PostgreSQL).
Providing a C-to-Verilog compiler.
Providing an application development environment and associated tools. (Presumably rather primitive, but I haven’t really checked it out.)
The applications mentioned in the NDN press release, and I quo... Read more
Derek Rodner blasts ANTs Software
Derek Rodner got snarky, and blasted Ants Software. Highlights include (emphasis mine):
I have never seen more thinly veiled attempts to make themselves bigger than they are. … In 2005, they did almost a half million dollars in revenue. That’s right, I said a half million, or $467,000 to be exact. In 2006, it got worse at $288,000 in revenue and last year they did $360,000. Yet, they continue to drone on about their “consortium” which, from the outside simply looks like a beta program. Its no consortium. … And, they continue to mention a major deal with IBM that COULD be worth millions over time. You can read about it in every SEC filing. But, it has never materialized. … They announced a major Oracle partnership, but Oracle never ack... Read more
IBM
IBM’s recent press release on Viper says:
Viper is expected to be the only database product able to seamlessly manage both conventional relational data and pure XML data without requiring the XML data to be reformatted or placed into a large object within the database.
That, so far as I know, is true, at least among major products.
I’m willing to apply the “native” label to Microsoft’s implementation anyway, because conceptually there’s little or no necessary performance difference between their approach and IBM’s. (Dang. I thought I posted more details on that months ago. I need to remedy the lack soon.)
As for Oracle — well, right now Oracle has a bit of a competitive problem …... Read more
Oracle
Jeff Jones of IBM wrote in to point out that Oracle is slathering on the price increases. I quote:
Some examples, comparing Oracle Technology Global Price Lists from December 2007 and June 2008 (prices are per processor):
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition: $40,000 to $47,500 = 18.75%
Berkeley DB XML – HA: $12,000 to $13,800 = 15%
Database Gateway for DRDA: $40,000 to $46,000 = 15%
Database Gateway for Informix: $15,000 to $17,500 = 16.67%
Express Server: $40,000 to $47,500 = 18.75%
Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus: $255,000 to $295,000 = 15.69%
Hyperion Essbase System 9: $160,000 to $184,000 = 15%
Universal Content Management: $100,000 to $115,000 = 15%
Good news for Oracle shareholders, I guess, th... Read more
Who is doing what in XML data management these days?
A comment thread to a post on a different subject has opened up a discussion of XML storage. Frankly, I haven’t kept up with my briefings on the subject, in part because XML support hasn’t proved to be very important yet to the big DBMS vendors, somewhat to my surprise. When last I looked, the situation wasn’t much different from what it was back in November, 2005. Unless I’ve missed something (and please tell me if I have!), here’s what’s going on:
Almost everybody has some kind of XML datatype, and SQL extensions to permit its use.
Almost everybody supports one or both of the two easy relational XML integrations:
XML as a BLOb/CLOb, but with extra indexing. The disadvantage of this is that you can’t retrieve data inside... Read more
Native XML storage, Part 1 (technology)
IBM’s “Viper” version of DB2 is in open beta test, whatever that means, and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005, nee Yukon, is in general release. Both have native XML capabilities surpassing Oracle’s – which is interesting in its own right, because it’s rare for either of those vendors to pull ahead of Oracle in an OLTP feature, and almost unprecedented for both to do so at once.
So let’s talk about native XML support, what it is, and who might or should care about it. (Well, the apps part is actually in a separate Part 2 post.) Most of this is based on research that’s several months old, but except for a scarcity of actual user interviews, that shouldn’t matter much.
There are two main non-native ways to put XML into a SQL database such as Oracle – shredding... Read more
Netezza is finally opening the kimono
I’ve bashed Netezza repeatedly for secrecy and obscurity about its technology and technical plans. Well, they’re getting a lot better. The latest post in a Netezza company blog, by marketing exec Phil Francisco, lays out their story clearly and concisely. And it’s backed up by a white paper that does more of the same. In particular, Page 11 of that white paper spells out possible future directions for enhancement, such as better compression, encryption, join filtering, and Netezza Developer Network stuff.
By the way, I kind of like nested acronyms, such as Netezza’s new FAST (FPGA-Accelerated Streaming Technology). But I’m not as thrilled about Netezza’s heavy use of “streaming”; I’d prefer that to be reserved for complex event/strea... Read more
A nice EnterpriseDB replacement of MySQL
I’m going to praise EnterpriseDB’s marketing communications twice in two blog posts, because I really liked some of the crunch they put into a press release announcing a MySQL replacement at FortiusOne. To wit (emphasis mine):
The PostGIS geospatial extensions to PostgreSQL played a key role in FortiusOne鈥檚 selection of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, a PostgreSQL-based solution, and dramatically improved performance. FortiusOne needed to run complex spatial queries against large datasets quickly and efficiently, and found the MySQL spatial extensions to be far less complete and comprehensive than PostGIS. EnterpriseDB Advanced Server processes some of GeoCommons鈥?database-intensive rendering requests in one-thirtieth of the time required by MySQL. During peak loads,... Read more
The Netezza strategy for data shipping
I talked with Netezza today, and finally understand better why they don’t have node-to-node data shipping problems with only 1-gigabit (gigE) interconnects:
Netezza boxes have lots of relatively small nodes, so all else being equal, each individual node has less communicating to do than, say, a DATAllegro node does.
It’s not just just 1-gigabit. There’s a hierarchical communications architecture, and at one level in the hierarchy switches are talking to each other through 32 parallel 1-gigabit channels at a time.... Read more
