I haven’t blogged in over a month now.  This is for a number of reasons.  Firstly I have been flat out with various activities.  This included a trip to VLDB in Lyon mid month.  Secondly, a lot of the companies I have spoken with this month aren’t ready to speak publically so hence no blog posts resulting from these sorts of discussions.

However there has been a wiff of a change in the air in terms of focus that is interesting and worth highlighting.  After years of lots of innovation around data analytics, OLTP is starting to make a comeback in terms of reclaiming some of the limelight.  Much more on this between now and the end of the year, but a couple things to watch:

• On the Radar: VoltDB
• …

I was fortunate enough to speak with Marcin Zukowski earlier about VectorWise.  If you missed it, VectorWise came out of stealth mode a day or two ago.  The have announced a joint partnership with Ingres and essentially are claiming impressive analytic RDBMS performance gains on conventional hardware.

To start with, a key message that I think needs to be communicated here is that this is not a product announcement.  Ingres and VectorWise have announced a partnership in which they of course plan to build products together, today those products are still in the works.

VectorWise is a spin out of CWI based on research that was undertaken by Marcin and others, research …

Image by Sebastian Bergmann via Flickr

I had a quick chat with Michael Widenius today.  He is on vacation so tried to keep the call short.  Essentially spoke about two topics, Oracle & an update on Maria.

The Monty Program has 15 staff now.  Their focus is getting the MariaDB branch of MySQL ready for release, I understand they have a target of next month (August) for this release.  The Maria storage engine has been delayed for the time being with the focus being on the branch release instead.  PBXT and XtraDB will …

The NoSQL movement has been gaining some steam lately, with discussion forums and mailing lists popping up all around the web.  Despite having a career that has been centered on the RDBMS, I have made no secret that I think we have gone too far down with our RDBMS for everything mindset.  I think we need to add a few more tools back into our data toolbox. 

Today, 99.5% of new data centric developments started will use a RDBMS by default.  Maybe .5 of a % will consider using something as obtuse as a NoSQL platform.  By experience I know the majority of people discussing NoSQL platforms today are web developers.  In fact there is almost a sense of trying to trying to keep this under the radar of DBAs.  If we don’t talk to the DBAs about this stuff then they won’t bother us with all that …

This post was a bit of a test to see if I could write a serious post about a database platform called Hamster.  I think I just made it :)

With all the noise over key/value stores recently, we should keep in mind that this technology isn’t exactly new.  It is being applied to new problems, but many of the foundations have been around for decades.  Probably the oldest of them all, Berkley DB came into existence during the mid ‘80’s and now has over 200 million deployments (according to the Oracle web site).

HamsterDB, while not having the same pedigree of Berkley, has been steadily worked on by Christoph Rupp for the last 5 years.  I spoke to Christoph yesterday about his release of a new edition of …

I spoke to Daniel Abadi this morning about his HadoopDB announcement that came out a couple of days back.  I am sure this has been a busy time for Daniel and his team over in Yale as HadoopDB has been getting a lot of interest which I am sure will continue to build.

Some notes from our discussion:

• HadoopDB is primarily focused on high scalability and the required availability at scale.  Daniel questions current MPP’s ability to truly scale past 100 nodes whereas Hadoop has real examples on 3000+ nodes.
• HadoopDB like many MPP analytical database platforms uses shared nothing relational database as processing units. HadoopDB uses Postgres.  Unlike other MPP databases, HadoopDB uses Hadoop as the …

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A while ago, about 16 years ago now, I had a desktop computer.  It wasn’t a PC.  It was an Acorn.  It had an ARM processor in it.  Despite the rest of the world starting going crazy for the new Pentium chip, the Acorn with its ARM processor could run rings about it in terms of computing power.  And it was simple and easy to use, I used to write applications in assembly code for it (and it didn't have a fan!).

Not too long after that Acorn went under, Arm was already off on its own to find a new market.  Its …

Forrester put out its Enterprise Data Management Q2 2009 report a few days ago, you can buy it from Forrester but it also seems to now be available for free from Microsoft here.  I don’t actively seek out these reports as they usually just re-enforce common knowledge (this one was no exception), however as it turned up I managed to find some time on the weekend for a quick read through.

Few surprises in this report, but some key mentions are:

• DBMS market expected to grow 8% annually
• IBM, Microsoft & Oracle own 88% of the DBMS market (by revenue)
• Current market estimated at $27 billion, $32 billion by 2013
• IBM, Ingres, Microsoft, Oracle, PostgreSQL, …

(yeah, this company is going to have to get used to the Austin Powers references.)

Groovy Corp put out a press release last night that starts the official launch of their SQL Switch relational database platform.

I have been speaking with Groovy for a few months, and while the press release is a bit noisy there is actually some interesting stuff in it.

First, an overview

• They are an in memory RDBMS
• They have worked with Intel to architect from the ground up for large multi processor concurrency
• Initially they are launching as a multi-core appliance
• They claim 200,000 sql operations per second from a single box
• They are proprietary (not built on MySQL or any other open source …

Recently on a number of sites the benefits for and against have been debated with, on occasion, these conversations falling into abuse being thrown in both directions.

From a pure technical perspective, the TPC benchmarks make little sense and are probably not relevant to 99% of organizations looking to implement a database technology.  But as a tool for generating visibility, debate and improved public awareness of a vendors technology they still have an impact. 

This is marketing, pure and simple.  Having a great TPC result is akin to an author having a great review on Amazon.  Doesn’t mean it is relevant for you but if faced with a stack of titles you haven’t yet read you’ll probably look more closely at the ones you’ve heard something positive about.

TPC’s are a tool for the marketing department, just the same as any other form of …