M-A-O-L

Danial Abadi throws a lengthy post at the DB world: The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL, introducing an even longer paper that they’re going to present at this months VLDB2010 in Singapore: The Case for Determinism in Database Systems.

This is good stuff, basically argueing that the reason people are going NoSQL to scale is because traditional ACID compliant RDBMS can’t scale as well, so he’s now looking at ways to get around the scaleability problem implications of ACID.

OMG, I just wasted about 2h updating my Twitter Ruby script because I didn’t carefully read this error message:

/home/maol/bin/politr_oauth.rb:39:in `authorize_from_request': wrong number of arguments (3 for 2) (ArgumentError)
from /home/maol/bin/politr_oauth.rb:39

Turns out my gem update run failed to update the twitter gem because of a missing ruby1.8-dev package on Debian, and I didn’t notice until very late. The old version of the gem expected two arguments instead of three, whereas the I read the message to mean it’s expecting 3 but only getting two.

I hope I’ve learned my lesson for a while again…

I know I’m late, but this is too important to let pass by. So HP is buying Stratavia, as reported by TechcrunchIT. It will fit nicely with what used to be Opsware and now seems to be called HP Data Center Automation Center. Quite a blow for GridApp, who I hear worked a lot with Opsware. Wonder what’s in for them – wouldn’t be surprised if BMC decided they needed to bolster their DB automation portfolio…

Interesting space to watch. Does anybody know of other companies specialized in enterprise database automation or orchestration?

Paul Carr, who luckily is a much better writer than I’ll ever be, has quit all the social and web 2.0 stuff to focus on his blog (and book, but that doesn’t count for me) again. Read about some first experiences in Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity, and then a 2nd update after also quitting Twitter on Wow. If You Think Quitting Booze Freaks People Out, Wait ‘Til You Quit Twitter.

It’s good to read all of this, and I could relate very much especially to the first article, because that’s exactly what lead to my leaving of Facebook, Twitter etc. on July 1st this year. And I don’t miss it. Although I have to admit that I didn’t go as far as Paul – I didn’t delete my accounts, I’m just ignoring them for now.

Recent work has increased my awareness for Workload Managed in busy warehouses, so I read DB2 workload management with interest. And was chuckling whenI read this, because I can’t say I’ve never heard the following argument being brought forward in earnest!

Sometimes, it seems, you simply don’t want queries to finish too fast. Why? Because if you give great performance when the machine is lightly loaded, then business users might expect that performance too when the machine is heavily loaded and you can’t deliver it. Apparently, in some environments it’s better to never deliver great query performance than it is to do so only inconsistently.

Check out Harnessing the Power of PowerPivot in the Enterprise for some advice on how to tackle the next big challenge after migrating MS Access DBs to more controlled enterprise offerings.

Most companies have, at some point, spent a fortune transitioning, changing platforms of, or supporting mission-critical applications written in MS Access by users who are, shall we say, less than savvy technically. PowerPivot could easily create a far greater drain on an unsuspecting IT organization. Not only can users create desktop applications (similar to Access), but they will also have the ability to publish their creations to the masses using shared infrastructure, a frightening prospect for many CIOs.

Ok, now I’m really worried!

Vertica used last week’s TDWI Conference to announce its FlexStore for Flash in Vertica & Flash: Runaway Performance at a Low Price. Good stuff, more vendors should provide that flexibility around different data tiers. Although I’m not sure we need all that (flexibility comes with complexity, and complexity it bad, but I guess you knew that already). Curt Monash of DBMS2 also commented about this, and used the opportunity to ramble about temp space, in Vertica’s innovative architecture for Flash, plus more about temp space than you perhaps wanted to know.

Merv Adrian has the authoritative write-up on the TDWI Conference last week in More TDWI Notes – ParAccel Rolling On, HP Stalled, Vertica Leading Insurgents, but Netezza also talks about it in Thinking about Right-Time Analytics in the Big Data Era at TDWI. Plus more on related announcements from Vertica at another day.

I’ve had Teradata on the phone yesterday, maybe will talk about that later. For now, here’s what Curt Monash has to say about what he heard from them: Teradata’s future product strategy.

• Single DBMS, capable of meeting all analytic needs while running in a single instance, usually running on …
• … proprietary hardware …
• … built from conservatively-chosen parts.

His update was all triggered by Teradata’s acquisition of Kickfire, which I entirely forgot to blog about.

Oracle RAC on VirtualBox is now possible because VirtualBox now supports shared disks. Tim Hall of ORACLE-BASE fame has added a write-up of all the steps required to get 11gR2 RAC on VirtualBox up and running. Thx Tim!