asking “what high performance database should I buy for my business?” New
technologies ... the transistor radio would ever replace the incumbent valve
radios.
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Spread It Around: The New DBMS Landscape by Dr. Michael Waclawiczek, Vice President of Marketing and Operations, NuoDB, Inc. What stock should I invest in? What car should I drive? What present should I buy my wife for her birthday? These days, thanks to the exponential growth of connected devices, cloud computing and web-scale applications like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, people are also asking “what high performance database should I buy for my business?” New technologies can be intimidating, because we all fear the unknown, and we especially don’t want to put something untested into the beating heart of our employer’s infrastructure. Cisco’s charismatic CEO John Chambers was probably one of the biggest architects of flux in industrial history as his company helped re-shape the network infrastructure of the world. But he once asked a mass audience of Cisco partners in Las Vegas a question: “Who likes change?” Only one man, an eager to please reseller, loudly testified, “I do.” Chambers tried to ignore this, paused, and then answered his own rhetorical question: “That’s right, nobody likes change.” Not even the man who changed industry forever likes change. But technology shifts are inevitable, so we have to face up to them, like it or not. Sometimes, the new technology doesn’t seem to have a rhyme or reason to it. Do you remember all the people who couldn’t see the point of the Internet? Going further back in time, it is quite easy to understand why nobody imagined that the transistor radio would ever replace the incumbent valve radios. The sound quality from a valve system was far superior. The only possible advantage that transistor radios had was portability. So transistor radios got a niche of the market, and bit-by-bit they improved and took another slice. You know how it ended. The database market has been undergoing a series of meaningful disruptions for several years. The relational database market is dominated by three creative behemoths, with Oracle owning 47 percent, while Microsoft at 18 percent is gaining on IBM with its 21 percent share*. Each of them is highly inventive and spends large amounts on research and development. They all know that traditional relational databases weren’t built for the age of cloud computing. They can’t easily scale out on commodity hardware; they can’t distribute databases globally without huge effort and expense. As they used to say on “Lost in Space” – a black and white TV show that was popular in the days when client/server databases were the state of the art – this just does not compute for historical RDBMS. The applications being created today don’t work with an old fashioned, number crunching, sequentially processing, monolithic database architecture. These days, a typical popular site has millions of users making millions of interactions all the time, all over the world and with high expectations that data will be available instantaneously. Google is a great example of the compelling need for a sea change. As anyone who ever googled knows, the company serves up ads along with the results for your search. The database required to manage Google Adwords is mammoth but is, in fact, just a larger version of what most web apps are all about. To handle the ad words load on a global basis, Google had to reinvent RDBMS. In their own words, a Google Research report states: “Many of the services that are critical to Google’s ad business have historically been backed by MySQL. We have recently migrated several of these services to F1, a new RDBMS developed at Google. F1 implements rich relational database features, including a strictly enforced schema, a powerful parallel SQL query engine, general transactions, change tracking and notification, and indexing, and is built on top of a highly distributed storage system that scales on standard hardware in Google data centers.” Besides wanting to avoid both customer and advertiser unhappiness with having to wait for search results, the sheer volume of ad word transactions could have also played havoc with mobile networks and even the cabled infrastructure. Google realized that of course the load on the world’s networks could be lessened if the data didn’t have to travel across the globe for each transaction and that could be possible if there are local databases. 15
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But as Google knew that will only happen if databases can be spread out across locations, and that doesn’t happen with traditional RDB. So there is more of a demand for the ‘disruptive technology’ represented by new generations of databases. So the new applications – as large as Google Adwords or as small as an app to compare the merits of different digital cameras online – being created, show how changing database technology has gradually evolved from a niche into something that can replace the dominant incumbent technology. Whereas the old technology could never evolve to take on the role played by new technology innovations. That brings us to NewSQL, the most promising of the 21st century RDBMS technologies. Wikipedia defines NewSQL as: “NewSQL is a class of modern relational database management systems that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for online transaction processing (read-write) workloads while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system.“ Wikipedia continues: “The term was first used by 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors. Many enterprise systems that handle high-profile data (e.g., financial and order processing systems) also need to be able to scale but are unable to use NoSQL solutions because they cannot give up strong transactional and consistency requirements. The only options previously available for these organizations were to either purchase a more powerful singlenode machine or develop custom middleware that distributes queries over traditional DBMS nodes. Both approaches are prohibitively expensive and thus are not an option for many. Thus, in this paper, Aslett discusses how NewSQL upstarts are poised to challenge the supremacy of commercial vendors, in particular Oracle.” NewSQL is an innovation that’s low risk and high reward. The strength, of course, is the support SQL. Here we can quantify the advantages. Training costs for developers is zero to minimal. Cost of scrapping and replacing SQL based development and reporting tools is zero to minimal. Cost of integration between NewSQL and traditional SQL systems is zero to minimal. Plus, we have the ACID guarantees. Most importantly, and underscoring Google’s move to a distributed database, is the looming potential to geodistribute a NewSQL DBMS just as F1 decided to do. The ideal method (beyond years of development and spending who-knows-how-much for the “Google only” F1 DBMS) would look like this: a single, logical database that is always active and consistent both within a single data center and across data centers. This supports running a database across physically separate geographic regions (for instance, running a database across servers in Sydney, Singapore, Virginia, and so on). Running such a geo-distributed database achieves
higher availability and fault-tolerance as well as support for applications and users that are geographically distributed themselves: for instance, a financial institution with offices at the major finance hubs around the world. We can thank the traditional RDBMS vendors for so effectively blazing the trail. We can thank the generation that followed them, namely the NoSQL vendors, for highlighting the importance of scaling out/ in (albeit while sacrificing the familiarity and power of SQL and the guarantees of ACID). But to truly tackle today’s database challenges, look to NewSQL to “spread it around” by geo-distributing databases that offer the best of both worlds: SQL/ACID and scale out/in.
About the Author
Dr. Michael Waclawiczek Vice President of Marketing and Operations, NuoDB, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts. For 25 years, Dr. Michael Waclawiczek has been a respected marketing and product management executive in the enterprise software industry. He has launched more than 20 major software products generating over $1 Billion in revenue. Michael has held several executive and senior management positions at private and public companies including Expressor Software (acquired by QlikTech), StreamBase Systems (acquired by Tibco), Kalido, IONA Technologies, Object Design, ICAD and Unigraphics. Prior to his corporate experience, Michael was Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, where he also received his Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Mechanical Engineering. For more information on Michael: www.nuodb.com.
*Footnote – Our estimates are based on publicly available information from IDC and Gartner. Averaging their estimates would put Oracle around 45% or higher, and IBM and MS are closer to 20% based on forecast data on the web.
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