Software, Interrupted- Page 10

Why relational databases make sense for big data

In 2010, the talk about a "big data" trend has reached a fever pitch. "Big data" centers around the notion that organizations are now (or soon will be) dealing with managing and extracting information from databases that are growing into the multi-petabyte range.

This dramatic amount of data has caused developers to seek new approaches that tend to avoid SQL queries and instead process data in a distributed manner. These so-called "NoSQL," such as Cassandra and MongoDB databases, are built to scale easily and handle massive amounts of data in a highly fluid manner.

And while I am a staunch supporter of the NoSQL approach, there is often a point where all of this data needs to be aggregated and parsed for different reasons, in a more traditional SQL data model.

It occurred to me recently that I've heard very little from the relational database (RDBMS) side of the house when it comes to dealing with big data. To that end, I recently caught up via e-mail with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, whose company provides services, support, and training around the open-source relational database PostgreSQL.

Boyajian stressed four points:

1. Relational databases can process ad-hoc queries

Production applications sometimes require only primary key lookups, but reporting queries often need to filter or aggregate based on other columns. Document databases and distributed key value stores sometimes don't support this at all, or they may support it only if an index on the relevant column has been defined in advance.

2. SQL reduces development time and improves interoperability

SQL is, and will likely remain, one of the most popular and successful computer languages of all time. SQL-aware development tools, reporting tools, monitoring tools, and connectors are available for just about every combination of operating system, platform, and database under the sun, and nearly every programmer or IT professional has at least a passing familiarity with SQL syntax.

Even for the types of relatively simple queries that are likely to be practical on huge data stores, writing an SQL query is typically simpler and faster than writing an algorithm to compute the desired answer, as is often necessary for data stores that do not include a query language. … Read more

The short, sweet life of a retweet

New research from social-analytics company Sysomos reveals--surprise!--that your tweets have fleeting value over the course of a day and, moreover, a lifetime.

Using the retweet as a key indicator for the life of a short message, Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months. The data shows that 29 percent of tweets produced a reaction, either a reply or retweet, and that 92 percent of retweets occur within the first hour of the original message.

This is an interesting set of data, with respect to the fact that companies have begun to embrace social media … Read more

International callers ready to go mobile

Consumers are ready to dump their landlines, move to Internet and video calls, and use their mobile devices to call internationally, according to a new survey from Harris Interactive.

While there are many reasons why consumers are looking to switch, the survey data based on a sample size of 2,258 U.S. adults 18 and over suggests that the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones is the primary driver. This is not terribly surprising but does show the vast opportunity still awaiting application developers who can crack the mobile market and evade the carriers.

Here are some tidbits from the … Read more

2010 acquisitions--Microsoft: 0, Google: 23

A recent blog post from information service provider CB Insights reveals a truly shocking piece of news: Microsoft has announced zero acquisitions in 2010, while Google has acquired 23 companies, 75 percent of which are venture financed or angel-backed.

Somewhat perversely, Twitter, which still can't figure out a sustainable revenue model, made three acquisitions related to social media and analytics, while IBM absorbed much of the enterprise software market. In fact, there were only a few acquisitions--primarily hardware related--that wouldn't have been interesting to Microsoft.

There are no doubt a multitude of reasons why Microsoft hasn't been … Read more

RightScale, Aster Data raise millions in funding

Today, two already well-funded companies announced new rounds of financing to support the growth of their businesses.

Cloud management platform RightScale raised $25 million in a C round of financing, bringing total funds raised to $47 million, while big data and analytics provider Aster Data raised $30 million in its C round, bringing its total funding to $53 million.

Management and tooling for cloud applications is again looking to be the "killer app" for the cloud and the more control that tools like RightScale give to users, the more adoption they see. Similarly, as the necessity for data … Read more

Devops to grow with cloud, data services (Q&A)

Devops is a relatively new concept that centers around the interdependence of development and operations and has been on the rise in the Web 2.0 world of virtualization and the cloud. The characteristics of devops include concepts like "architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager--all in one" and "ability to write code beyond simple scripts" all working toward an ideal of managing infrastructure in an automated fashion.

One of the players in this market is Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of the Puppet Labs, which provides support and service to users of the Puppet open-source server automation tool, and is hosting its Puppet Camp 2010 next month in San Francisco. (Disclaimer: I serve as an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

I asked Kanies some questions about devops, automation, systems management, and the cloud.

Q: Give us a brief overview of the rise of devops and why it matters? Kanies: Devops is essentially a cultural movement toward more development-like operations. First and foremost this means acknowledging and impressing the fact that your infrastructure is code, so you should be using developer tools and practice to maintain and interact with it. It also means that you should have the same requirements of your infrastructure as you do of your applications--you need an API, high quality data, version control, access control, auditing, and more.

The reason it matters is that the problems of IT have outstripped its ability to deal with them--our tools and practices largely aren't built for a world where you can turn up 36,000 machines in a week or deploy 1,000 machines an hour, nor where your boss can expect full deployment of an application across thousands of nodes in seconds or minutes rather than weeks or months. Devops attempts to fix these problems with a culture and practice that adopts and adapts development tools in the infrastructure and builds a culture of delivery and agility. … Read more

Survey: Virtualization and cloud need management

A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.

The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.

However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of … Read more

'Anti-Facebook' project releases first batch of code

The open-source Diaspora project released on Wednesday the first iteration of its so-called anti-Facebook social-networking application.

According to a blog post, the development team aims to work with the community to enhance and extend the software in order to create a better project. Hardly an original idea in the open-source world, but certainly a logical ideal in light of the fact that social-networking applications require a good bit of insight from users and developers--something we've seen Facebook embrace, occasionally forcibly by its own community.

There are a number of capabilities in the current release that start to outline how … Read more

Xeround scales MySQL for the cloud

Today, Xeround officially announced the release of the private beta of its "MySQL for the Cloud" service--an elastic, linearly scalable, relational database designed to run applications in cloud environments.

Xeround is based on an in-memory database and has been tested in a number of telco production environments, according to CEO Razi Sharir. The software utilizes virtual partitions where data partitions are decoupled--or abstracted--from physical resources. These virtual partitions hold copies of both the data and the indexes, in order to ensure high availability and performance.

Despite the ubiquity of open-source MySQL, the database has in the past suffered … Read more

French start-up bringing open-source BPM to U.S.

A relatively new French open-source start-up is set to soon make landfall in the U.S.--BonitaSoft, a maker of open-source business process management (BPM) software. BonitaSoft aims to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary suites from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and SAP that dominate the BPM market. (Other French open-source start-ups in the U.S. market include Talend and eXo.)

The company is built around the open-source Bonita project, first developed in 2001 at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). The development team was then hired by French software giant Bull … Read more