M-A-O-L

Oracle Openworld must be close, because the rumour mill starts heating up… Piper Jaffray is predicting that Oracle will release an Exadata Mini machine that will fit under ones desk (via DBMS2). And Jean-Pierre Dijcks compiled a list of Big Data related sessions at Openworld, Big Data may very well be the key note topic, I hear, so it’s worth spending some time at these sessions.

Some Sybase PR about their latest release: Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.7 Boosts Performance and Lowers Cost of Managing Exploding Data Volumes

ASE 15.7 further reduces cost of operations by simplifying administration and enhancing system security, providing a database manager that remains easy to manage while protecting against intrusion. ASE 15.7’s online operations and extended diagnostic features increase data availability, optimize the data for application performance and quickly pinpoint bottlenecks to speed performance. Strong password encryption and single login profiles protect the database from unauthorized external access attempts and make it easier to manage large numbers of users.

Sybase 15.7 is quite a major update to 15.5, there are more details in the Sybase ASE 15.7 New Features guide.

Oracle’s MySQL Blog reports about New Commercial Extensions for MySQL Enterprise Edition:

MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Releases have delivered many new compelling features to the MySQL users and community for testing, feedback and use.

In addition, commercial customers have access to a number of commercial extensions already included in MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Monitor
• MySQL Enterprise Backup

Continuing the business model of MySQL, we are adding three new commercial extensions to MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Scalability
• MySQL Enterprise High Availability
• MySQL Enterprise Security

Via Heise, who have some coverage in German.

You don’t have to wait for long… Oracle Introduces Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, just days after I blogged about it at Forthcoming Oracle Appliances. Configurations from half rack to several full racks can be combined for massive storage. Interesting that Oracle wants us to use this not only for relational data but all sorts or other stuff as well:

The Oracle Exadata Storage Expansion Rack is ideal for storing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data including historical relational data; backups of Oracle Exadata Database Machine; weblogs; documents, images, LOBs and XML files

Curt Monash about Forthcoming Oracle appliances, based on information from Oracle’s earnings call (full transcript) last week. There will be an IMDB appliance based on TimesTen for high speed analytics, and a Hadoop appliance for MapReduce jobs, targetted at data preprocessing and feeding into Oracle. It really looks like Oracle is full steam ahead on the appliance strategy, and is also starting to embrace the MapReduce and massively parallel models. All of that is likely to be announced in more details at Oracle Open World.

Good 28 page whitepaper on NoSQL for SQL Server developers, first familiarizing the reader with NoSQL, then showing what NoSQL options there are in the Microsoft and Azure stack. Also a fair bit of positioning and what are appropriate use cases for NoSQL.

A nice howto on AlwaysOn, the combined Mirroring and Clustering HA/DR solution in SQL Denali, the next version of SQL.

Reported and analysed by Tony Baer in OnStrategies Perspectives, and reported by Derrick Harris in GigaOm’s in EMC, NetApp Make It a Big Day for Big Data Star Hadoop, we learn that EMC is using the on-going EMC World conference to its potential, and is announcing that they’re growing the Database division with the decision to sell their own Hadoop distribution with value add management tools and integration. I expect to see more soon.

Yahoo is considering to turn Hadoop into a business, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Ovum’s Tony Baer has a more detailed analysis at his blog in Yahoo to Hadoop: Show me the Money.

In the long run, we also expect IBM to make a stab at Hadoop and related technologies by extending its InfoSphere offerings -– it can see Cloudera-Informatica and Cloudera-MicroStrategy raise it one with its own InfoSphere DataStage and Cognos offerings, before it even talks about partnerships. Today we saw a shot from left field – Yahoo which invented the technology – is now saying it might spin off its Hadoop business to go up against Cloudera, and potentially IBM. In a way, its closing the doors after the horses left the barn as the creator of Hadoop is now part of Cloudera.

 

 

For Yahoo, this would clearly be a shot out of its comfort zone, as it is not a tools company. But it is hungry for monetizing its intellectual property, even if that property has already been open sourced. It’s redolent of Sun striving to monetize Java and we all know how that went. Obviously this will be an uphill battle for Yahoo, but at least this would be a spinoff so hopefully there won’t be distractions from the mother ship. Given Yahoo’s fortunes, we shouldn’t be surprised that they are now looking to maximize what they can get out of the family jewels.

More commercial offerings in NoSQL can only be a good thing.

I don’t think I’ve written about Google’s Megastore yet, so here’s a quick summary of worthwile resources.

Megastore is the data engine supporting the Google Application Engine. It’s a scalable structured data store providing full ACID semantics within partitions but lower consistency guarantees across partitions.

James Hamilton’s take on Google Megastore: The Data Engine Behind GAE. His blog is worth following for people interested in scaling infrastructure in general, not just DBs. Todd Hoff’s write-up is about Google Megastore – 3 Billion Writes and 20 Billion Read Transactions Daily, his blog is about everything High Scalability. And last but not least the Storage Mojo take on Google’s Megastore, from a storage insider.