“HBase and Hadoop are the only technologies proven to scale to dozens of petabytes on commodity servers, currently being used by companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Adobe and Salesforce.com.”–Monte Zweben.

Is it possible to turn Hadoop into a RDBMS? On this topic, I have interviewed Monte Zweben, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Splice Machine.

RVZ

Q1. What are the main challenges of applications and operational analytics that support real-time, interactive queries on data updated in real-time for Big Data?

Monte Zweben: Let’s break down “real-time, interactive queries on data updated in real-time for Big Data”. “Real-time, interactive queries” means that results need to be returned in milliseconds to a few seconds.
For “Data updated in real-time” to happen, …

Well, every now and then, when we began to start a new project or app, which has some data storage requirement, we have a deep intriguing thought as to how best represent the data structure so as to support a variety of needs including but not limited to (ACID rules):

1. Normalization
2. Reliability
3. Consistency
4. And many others

Below, I provide a set of steps which you can follow to arrive at a data model that correctly suites your requirements.

Steps:

1. Identify the project or app requirements / specifications and business rules which tell you what your app will be able to do when it is ready.
2. From these business rules, identify possible objects for each business rule and mark them in a paper using rectangular sections like authors, posts etc.
3. Once you have recognized the …

“There are four things that motivate open source development teams:
1. The challenge/puzzle of programming, 2. Need for the software, 3. Personal advancement, 4. Belief in open source” — Bruce Momjian.

On PostgreSQL and the challenges of motivating and managing open source teams, I have interviewed Bruce Momjian, Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB, and Co-founder of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and Core Contributor.

RVZ

Q1. How did you manage to transform PostgreSQL from an abandoned academic project into a commercially viable, now enterprise relational database?

Bruce Momjian: Ever since I was a developer of database …

Join 7500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

There’s a lot of talk on the web about scalability. Making web applications scale is not easy. The modern web architecture has so many moving parts. How can we grapple with the underlying problem?

Also: Why Are MySQL DBAs So Hard to Find?

The LAMP stack scales well

The truth that is half right. True there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot to setup. The internet stack made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. LAMP as it’s called, was built to be resilient, dynamic, and scalable. It’s essentially why Amazon works. Why what they’re doing is possible. Windows …

In this post I’m going to discuss the strategy used by our team to manage the changes taking place in the database. Most of the time we as developers mainly focus on implementing the feature and put less effort on manage the database changes. For instance individual might not straight away see the importance in […]

NSFW (audio) “…pipe your data to /dev/null – it will be very fast.” “Does /dev/null support sharding?” NSFW (audio) “…the only thing constructive we could have used their source files for was as random keys for SSL certs.” NSFW (audio) “PHP reeks … Continue reading →

The Brief
The Client’s mystery shopping programme consists of visits to each of the client’s ten locations, grouped into five different areas. Each location receives a single visit each month, but on occasion a visit may not take place.
On the completion of each visit, a questionnaire is completed by the mystery shopper that is used to rate the service they received during the visit. The completed questionnaire is assigned a score, which is calculated based on the number of points achieved over the number of points available, normally expressed as a percentage.
Points Achieved x 100 Points Available
= % Score
PHP Development Test
The Client has requested that an end of year report is generated to summarise the data collected over the previous year. The report should be easy to understand and show as much useful information as possible.
Test Requirements
A PHP application should be …

In this second part of a series of blogs on using a NoSQL database, in this case MongoDB, aimed at MySQL users, I will describe querying a bit. And it's probably not what you expected if you haven't tried a NoSQL database or MongoDB more specifically, before. The first blogpost on this subject is here.

At the heart of accessing MongoDB is JavaScript, more specifically it uses the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. As I wrote in the previous blog on this subject, JavScript is all over the place in MongoB, largely you can look at MonngoDB as JavaScript with HUGE space for variables, and although many would look at this as gross oversimplification, it works as simple descripton of …

MySQL Cluster* is one of the most advanced and scalable databases available today and, despite what its name might suggest, it is also a brilliant NoSQL database**.
Let me discuss this statement!
First, let’s discuss the high level issues that NoSQL databases try to address: -     Scalability. Traditional RDBMS technology was designed four decades ago, and is not appropriate for today’s Big Data requirements. Database systems today need to be able to scale horizontally over multiple machines to handle millions of users. As the CAP theorem states, it is not possible to achieve availability, scalability and consistency in one system. Several NoSQL databases sacrifice consistency for availability and scalability. -     RDBMS has a rigid data model. Once a normalized data model has been defined in an RDBMS, it is …

If you execute the following, what does your RDBMS do?

CREATE TABLE t1 (a int);
START TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO t1 (a) VALUES (1);
START TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO t1 (a) VALUES (2);
ROLLBACK;
SELECT * FROM t1;

The answer may surprise you.