sql

NoSQL goes mobile with the help of CouchDB

If there is one aspect of mobility that has yet to live up to user expectations, it's the ability for data to be accessible in near real-time across multiple devices.

Despite all the advances in technology, including a wealth of Wi-Fi and 3G networks, many devices become impotent without an Internet connection.

This issue becomes even more apparent when you are dealing with browser-based applications and smartphones that don't have multithreading functionality to maintain state across applications and data stores.

I recently had the chance to chat with Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB and CEO of Couchio, … Read more

Apache Cassandra gets boost from Riptano (Q&A)

A new company called Riptano recently launched to provide support and services for the Apache Cassandra project, a nonrelational open-source database designed for high performance that has a strong presence in Web shops like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. I recently had the chance to chat with Matt Pfeil, founder of Riptano, and he provided some insight into the project and the new world of NoSQL database approaches.

What exactly is Cassandra and who uses it? Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed, open source database. It's a top-level Apache project with committers from Riptano, Rackspace, Digg, Facebook, and others.

Cassandra … Read more

MySQL's new best friend forever? Oracle

MySQL, once the darling of the database world, is now under attack from all sides. The NoSQL movement questions MySQL's relevance for the Web applications that made it hugely popular. The Drizzle project derides its relevance for the cloud.

MySQL still has one major ally, however, and it's the one that most people thought was its biggest enemy:

Oracle.

The European Commission, among others, worried that Oracle's purchase of Sun, which bought MySQL for $1 billion in 2008, would cripple database competition by stifling MySQL's development. According to Wim Coakaerts, Oracle's Vice President of Linux … Read more

Open-source evolution hits overdrive

Update at 5:30 AM Pacific on March 2, 2010: I mistakenly reported that Facebook has moved from MySQL in favor of Cassandra. According to a credible source familiar with Facebook's systems, this is not the case. Indeed, you can actually follow "MySQLatFacebook" on Facebook. I apologize for the error and am glad to see MySQL is still in active usage at Facebook.

Open-source software has hastened the evolution of Web applications as it drives out the inefficiencies and costs of proprietary software to enable companies like Google and Twitter to scale. But it's not just … Read more

NoSQL in the real world

A few weeks back I wrote about the cloud-related trend of "NoSQL," a set of operational-data technologies based on non-relational database principles. But beyond the developer crowd and smaller Web-based businesses, how much has this trend taken root in "real world" production environments?

I recently spoke with Durran Jordan and Les Hill of Hashrocket, a Florida-based Web design and development group, about their use of MongoDB (which is billed as a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database) in an application for one of their pharma customers.

Hashrocket's customer had an existing SQL-based application that … Read more

Big IT vendors overcomplicating the cloud

Enterprise IT tends to see waves of interest and productivity related to new technologies that ebb and flow with interest from users and developers. Cloud computing in a variety of forms--compute power, storage, etc.--has been the recent poster child for reducing cost and complexity.

There is little question that users want to make their technology life easier, which is why cloud services have been embraced so heartily to date. And because users are interested in the cloud, large enterprise vendors are looking to capitalize on the interest and adoption.

This obviously makes sense. Corporations exist to make money. And … Read more

Oracle loses some MySQL mojo

Ever since Oracle closed on its acquisition of MySQL, the open-source world has been wondering where the code has gone. Many people searched, fruitlessly, for the formerly available MySQL source code.

They might have done better to search for Oracle's point person on MySQL, Ken Jacobs.

On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle's liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB. … Read more

Oracle lays out plans for Sun

After announcing earlier Wednesday that it closed its $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle followed up with a previously scheduled Webcast during which executives laid out the rationale for the acquisition and detailed plans for much of Sun's product portfolio.

When the acquisition was first announced, it seemed an odd match to many. Oracle was a software company, and Sun was widely thought of as a hardware company--though it was really more than that. But there was always another aspect to this, if you thought more broadly about where the computer industry was headed.

The big boys were all aligning through either acquisition or partnership into the sort of vertically integrated computer companies that were once familiar but were largely displaced by processor, operating system, server, storage, and networking specialists.

At the time of Oracle's announcement that it was acquiring Sun, we had already seen moves like Hewlett-Packard's purchase of EDS and the ramp-up of its ProCurve networking business. The subsequent months have only highlighted this trend, with the increasingly close partnership between Cisco Systems, EMC, and EMC's VMware subsidiary. And HP's acquisition of 3Com and partnership announcement with Microsoft. IBM never abandoned a considerable vertical bent.

With Sun and Oracle's announcement of a database appliance last fall, there could no longer be any doubt that delivering factory-integrated stacks from server to storage to software was a big part of this acquisition. The only surprise today was the strength of the all-Oracle stack message.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, among others, made it clear that the IBM of the 1960s was the company's integration model. There were a few references to selling "best-of-breed components" to customers who wanted to purchase that way. But promoting the benefits of buying a complete hardware and software stack designed to work together was one of the other overriding themes of the day. I'm not sure that I heard "heterogeneous"--one of the terms that computer companies like to use, even when they don't really mean it--uttered once during the five-hour broadcast.

The other big theme could be summed up as something along the lines of: Sun had great innovation but executed really poorly. For example, Oracle President Charles Phillips said "Sun had created a very complex supply chain" and that Oracle was going to "implement a more attractive systems support plan. Some [support was] done by Sun, some by others, some by no one." Ellison was, if anything, more blunt: "We just need to do a better job of taking engineering output and delivering to customers."

There was much throughout the day on that theme, and it's hard to argue with the basic contention.… Read more

Oracle-Sun deal gets EU approval, finally

The European Commission has officially approved the Oracle-Sun merger, paving the way for Oracle to take over Sun Microsystems in a deal valued at more than $7 billion.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products," said Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner, in a statement Thursday.

The approval by the EC, which faced a late-January deadline, comes after months of limbo during which the Commission expressed skepticism about the antitrust aspects … Read more