Tony Bain

The Commoditization of MPP

Image by scottpowerz via Flickr

Next year will be the start of much more difficult times for the existing MPP start ups/ early stage companies (including Greenplum, Vertica, Netezza, Xtreme Data, Kognitio, Aster Data etc).  This is because Microsoft introducing an MPP solution is the start of the commoditization of the technology and market (Madison now known as Parallel Data Server).  To understand this you need to understand the sales process for MPP.  It goes something like:

CIO: We need a data warehouse, what platform should we use?
DBA: We are an [Oracle | SQL Server] shop so use that.
CIO: Ok.

Some time later….

CIO: Our data warehouse is very slow and people are complaining.
DBA: The server is too small as you have loaded much more data than planned. We need a bigger box.
CIO: Ok.

Some time later….

CIO: Our data warehouse is slow again
DBA: I know but we have the biggest box we can get and we have tuned everything and I am out of ideas.

CIO: Our data warehouse is slow
Consultant: Yes of course it is, you need to use an MPP platform
CIO: We are an [Oracle | SQL Server ] shop so do these vendors have a solution?
Consultant: [Yes but it will cost you | No].
CIO: What about [SQL Server | Oracle ]?
Consultant: [No | Yes but it will cost you].
CIO: What about Teradata?
Consultant: Yes but it will cost you.
CIO: Oh.  Any other options?
Consultant: Yes there are a bunch of start ups selling MPP solutions.
CIO: Which one is best?
Consultant: They are all good but all slightly different.
CIO: Ok, make a short list and we will do a proof of concept to see which platform does what we want at the price we want.

Some months later.

CIO: Congratulations [Vertica | Greenplum | Netezza | Aster Data | Kognitio ] you have won our business.

You see the problem in this approach for the existing MPP vendors is much of the trickle down that is occurring now is going to be caught higher up by the shear fact that Microsoft has MPP.  This must be a big worry and I think we will see some consolidation of MPP vendors before 2012.

Relaxed raises funds - CouchDB

Image via Wikipedia

I just noticed Damian Katz (an original author CouchDB) has raised $2m in early funding for his CouchDB related company Relaxed.  I spoke with Damian a couple of months back and have a fair idea of what they have in mind (is exciting btw) and wish them well on this endeavor.

End is in sight for Oracle & Sun

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Oracle has published their promises which have reportedly gone a long way to appeasing the EU, so the likely outcome is the takeover of Sun will be approved in January.

My own personal opinion has been the anti-competitive stance really didn’t hold much water.  Reading Oracle’s promises, none appear very extreme (largely agreeing to maintain the status quo) which would lead you to question why it has taken so long to sort out.  But importantly for getting this resolved they are a concession by Oracle and a win for the EU.

 Hopefully shortly the mop up can begin.

The full Oracle press release is here and Curt Monash’s related post is here.

1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.

MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture shall mean MySQL’s current practice of using, publicly-available, documented application programming interfaces to allow storage engine vendors to “plug” into the MySQL database server. Documentation shall be consistent with the documentation currently provided by Sun.

2. Non-assertion. As copyright holder, Oracle will change Sun’s current policy and shall not assert or threaten to assert against anyone that a third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL because they have implemented the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
A commercial license will not be required by Oracle from third party storage engine vendors in order to implement the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
Oracle shall reproduce this commitment in contractual commitments to storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun.
3. License commitment. Upon termination of their current MySQL OEM Agreement, Oracle shall offer storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun an extension of their Agreement on the same terms and conditions for a term not exceeding December 10, 2014.
Oracle shall reproduce this commitment in contractual commitments to storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun.

4. Commitment to enhance MySQL in the future under the GPL. Oracle shall continue to enhance MySQL and make subsequent versions of MySQL, including Version 6, available under the GPL. Oracle will not release any new, enhanced version of MySQL Enterprise Edition without contemporaneously releasing a new, also enhanced version of MySQL Community Edition licensed under the GPL. Oracle shall continue to make the source code of all versions of MySQL Community Edition publicly available at no charge.

5. Support not mandatory. Customers will not be required to purchase support services from Oracle as a condition to obtaining a commercial license to MySQL.

6. Increase spending on MySQL research and development. Oracle commits to make available appropriate funding for the MySQL continued development (GPL version and commercial version). During each of the next three years, Oracle will spend more on research and development (R&D) for the MySQL Global Business Unit than Sun spent in its most recent fiscal year (USD 24 million) preceding the closing of the transaction.

7. MySQL Customer Advisory Board. No later than six months after the anniversary of the closing, Oracle will create and fund a customer advisory board, including in particular end users and embedded customers, to provide guidance and feedback on MySQL development priorities and other issues of importance to MySQL customers.

8. MySQL Storage Engine Vendor Advisory Board. No later than six months after the anniversary of the closing, Oracle will create and fund a storage engine vendor advisory board, to provide guidance and feedback on MySQL development priorities and other issues of importance to MySQL storage engine vendors.

9. MySQL Reference Manual. Oracle will continue to maintain, update and make available for download at no charge a MySQL Reference Manual similar in quality to that currently made available by Sun.

10. Preserve Customer Choice for Support. Oracle will ensure that end-user and embedded customers paying for MySQL support subscriptions will be able to renew their subscriptions on an annual or multi-year basis, according to the customer’s preference.

It may be premature to assume this is now done and dusted, but for Oracle to publish this I presume they have had it okay'd by the EU first (also reports have been made that the EU has responded positivley to this agreement).

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• Oracle defrosts EC concerns over Sun takeover (theregister.co.uk)

Is Cassandra winning the NoSQL race?

Cassandra is fast emerging as one of the key NoSQL databases.  While we often express that the point of NoSQL is to offer more choice than an “RDBMS” hammer for every nail, there are practical reasons why a small number of stack technologies gain dominance and others circle on the sidelines.

Cassandra has already ticked many of the boxes needed to shoot it into the stratosphere as a widely used, default database platform.  Especially so in the web world where high scalability, high availability, open source and being proven by a bigger fish all matter.  Specifically Cassandra has:

• The ability to scale across many nodes
• The ability to scale to many hundreds of gigabytes of data
• High availability, losing a node doesn’t take down the cluster & online node provisioning and data distribution (and automated data copy).  Also is decentralized (every node is the same as another, no single point of failure).
• Bigtable like “Column Families” (more advanced schema control than DHT)
• Dynamo like eventual consistency (not a plus but a trade off required for scalability) & log based recovery and the ability to either write asynchronously or synchronously

Cassandra, if you’re note familiar, was built originally by Facebook as an internal database system required to help them scale to their massive data demands.  It was then thrown over the wall and made open source, where the community picked it up and ran with it.  Cassandra is capable of supporting transaction processing workloads at large scale and has found favor at RackSpace, Twitter, Digg and others.

Interestingly, I understand Facebook forked the code and have continued to develop their own internal version independently of the open source version.  The open source Cassandra is now largely developed by RackSpace where they have 3 people working full time (+ the community at large) lead by Jonathan Ellis & Digg.  The reasons behind this aren’t entirely clear, but one may assume that Facebook were happy to share their work with the community, but don’t have the time or interest in managing the ongoing development of an open source project.

Scale is the primary reason why you would choose a platform like Cassandra.  Traditional RDBMS’s start to struggle when you want to go over 1 node, and big clusters are currently only really possible using expensive shared disk technology or when targeting specialized analytical workloads (MPP RDBMS).  I understand Facebook is running a 150 node Cassandra cluster and others have 30+ node clusters in production also.

What Cassandra is majorly lacking right now (apart from secondary indexes which I think they are working on) is the backing of a commercial vendor who is providing product support (RackSpace are not doing this).  But I am sure this will be addressed in the near future with either RackSpace spinning something up or someone like Cloudera adding it to their responsibilities.