It’s almost the end of the year – that means holiday cards, shopping, cooking, parties, and the inevitable year-end top lists (including gems like this one).

In the spirit of end of year list making, we fed our 60+ blogs this year through Google Analytics to find out what our own top ten blogs were (outside of product announcements). So if you missed an episode of the View (TokuView that is) we’ve got a Tokutek Top Ten for you (spoiler alert – they are mostly technical):

10. Cage Match: OldSQL, NoSQL and NewSQL – References to mud …

At next month’s Boston MySQL Meetup, I will give a talk: “Fractal Tree Indexes – Theoretical Overview and Customer Use Cases.” The meetup is 7 pm Monday, January 9th, 2012, and will be held at MIT Building E51 Room 337e (corner of Ames & Amherst St, Cambridge, MA). Thanks to host Sheeri Cabral for the invitation.

Most databases employ B-trees to achieve a good tradeoff between the ability to update data quickly and to search it quickly. It turns out that B-trees are far from the optimum in this tradeoff …

More and more public cloud companies are moving to managed cloud services to improve their value-add (price premium) and the stickiness of their solution. However, the shift to a database as a service (DaaS) severely reduces the DBAs visibility into the business, thus limiting the ability to hand tune the database to the requirements of the application and the database. The solution is a cloud database that eliminates the hand-tuning of the database, thereby enabling the DBA to be equally effective even with limited visibility into the business and application needs. It is these unique needs, particularly for SQL databases, that is fueling the NewSQL movement.
DBAs traditionally have insight into the company, enabling them to hand tune the database in a collaborative basis with the development team, such as:
1. Performance Trade-offs/Tuning: The database is partitioned and tuned to address business requirements, maximizing performance of …

As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation, maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your database software and you were the DBA managing all aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …

Intent Media

Issue addressed: Ad hoc analytics on clickstream data arriving too fast for InnoDB or NoSQL to handle.

TokuDB powers an online advertising application

The Company: Headquartered in New York, Intent Media is a fast-growing online advertising startup. The company helps some of the largest online retailers monetize their traffic more efficiently at scale by showing highly relevant and targeted advertising to the 97+% of e-commerce visitors who do not transact.

The Challenge: The Intent Media platform processes hundreds of millions of events a day generated by media placements across leading e-commerce sites — a textbook “Big Data” challenge. Intent Media’s data is used to optimize media placements, drive segmentation models, and …

Archimedes, the first DBA

According to a recent MIT Sloan Management Review study, top performing organizations use analytics 5 times more than lower performers. That’s pretty astounding. And while we all know about the ocean/lake/waves/(your favorite water analogy) of Big Data we struggle with everyday, information is not knowledge. So how can we get insight from data? Recent articles from O’Reilly and HBR offered some …

A friend recently bought a GM car. I proceeded to inform him that I am shorting GM stock (technically a put option). He was shocked. “But they make great cars,” he exclaimed. I responded, “I’m not shorting the cars, I’m shorting the company.” Why am I recounting this exchange? Because I believe that the new wave of NoSQL companies—as opposed to the rebranded ODBMS—presents the same situation. I am long the products, but short the companies.
Let me explain. NoSQL companies have built some very cool products that solve real business problems. The challenge is that they are all open source products serving niche markets. They have customer funnels that are simply too small to sustain the companies given their low conversion/monetization rates.
These companies could certainly be tasty acquisition targets for companies that actually make money. But as standalone companies, sadly, I would short them. On that note, I am off to …

The primary reasons people are moving to the public cloud are: (1) replace capital expenses with operating expenses (pay as you go); (2) use shared resources for processes like back-up, maintenance, networking (shared expenses); (3) use shared infrastructure that enables you to pay only for those resources you actually use, instead of consuming your maximum load resources at all times (pay-per-use). The first thing you’ll notice is that all 3 cloud benefits have their basis in finances or the cloud business model.
We will focus in on #3 above: Pay-Per-Use. The old school model was to build your compute infrastructure for the maximum load today, plus growth over the life-cycle of the equipment, plus some buffer so the systems don’t get overloaded from spikes in usage. The net result is that your average usage might run 10% of the potential for the infrastructure you mortgaged your home to buy. In other words, you were paying 10X more than …

When I interviewed at Tokutek, I met a team of distinguished academics and engineers who could calmly and thoughtfully wax eloquent about the finer points of B-tree and Fractal Tree™ indexing,  drive I/Os, and database engines. Soon after, I discovered that several of my colleagues have a second passion — they practice Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). As Wikipedia explains, MMA showcases the “fighters of different disciplines, including boxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, Muay Thai, karate and others.” I’ve since learned about many different fighting styles.

This was useful to understand when an MMA-style fight broke out in the MySQL world earlier this month between the different variants or …

The primary database architectures—shared-disk and shared-nothing—each have their advantages. Shared-disk has functional advantages such as high-availability, elasticity, ease of set-up and maintenance, eliminates partitioning/sharding, eliminates master-slave, etc. The shared-nothing advantages are better performance and lower costs. What if you could offer a database that is a hybrid of the two; one that offers the advantages of both. This sounds too good to be true, but it is fact what ScaleDB has done.
The underlying architecture is shared-disk, but in many situations it can operate like shared-nothing. You see the problems with shared-disk arise from the messaging necessary to (a) ship data among nodes and storage; and (b) synchronize the nodes in the cluster. The trick is to move the messaging outside of the transaction so it doesn’t impact performance. The way to achieve that is to exploit locality. Let …