IBM Donates Java Database App. to Apache Foundation

the_pooh_experience writes "IBM has announced that it will open up Cloudscape by giving it to the Apache Software Foundation. Cloudscape, a small footprint Java database, is primarily used for small scale websites and point-of-sale systems. Its new, opensource name will be 'Derby.' Cloudscape (originally created by Informix, and purchased by IBM in 2001) has been valued by IBM at $85M."

Comments

"public domain" is not the same as "open source"

[samuel4242]

Geez is the NYT dumb. Putting something in the "public domain" means you relinguish control. It's owned equally by everyone. Choosing an "open source" license means you keep control. If you're careful about how you do it, you can even change the license terms a bit later. MySQL is constantly tweaking their terms because they're the sole copyright owner. Sure, it's available under the GPL, but they can tweak the terms for preferred customers. And they do! That's still their perogative because the code is NOT in the public domain.

Value

[Anonymous Coward]

"...has been valued by IBM at $85M."

Now, it's free, so it's worthless.

Re:Value

[Tassach]

It may well be worth $85M, but how much would it cost IBM to maintain it? Besides, it would only be worth that much if they could find a buyer, and it's pretty unlikely that they'd find someone to buy it at that price.

An $85M "asset" isn't worth much if you have to spend $16M a year maintaining and supporting it. Also, remember that IBM has several other database products this would be competing against. The fact that they released it as Open Source is a very good thing for everyone, considering that they could have just abandoned the code and kept it locked away. This way they get good publicity, reduce their maintenance costs, and get a nice tax break.

Another point that IBM really isn't in the business of selling either software or hardware anymore -- they sell SOLUTIONS. Nowadays, most of Big Blue's revenue comes from sending consultants out to tell customers what hardware and software they need to run their business, and then putting all the pieces together for them so the whole thing works. While they'd prefer to sell you IBM hardware and IBM software, they're pretty agnostic in that regard. Having their own pet OSS database allows them to offer an IBM-backed solution for lower-end projects which don't have the money for a DB2 license.

Foot in the door?

[frostman]

I had a look at the IBM product page and found this:

Supports complex SQL, transactions and JDBC so that your applications can be migrated to DB2 UDB when they need to grow.

...which makes me wonder whether this is part of a strategy to get the foundation and community to do the work maintaining something that may not have been profitable but was something their service division could get people using as a baby step towards DB2.

In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.

Re:Foot in the door?

[rjstanford]

In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.

I've never used Cloudscape, but coming from its Informix roots I trust this - to a certain extent, of course. If you never used Informix, it absolutely rocked in terms of stability and ease of maintenance. We had one Informix DBA for every 100 or so installed machines (with many installed instances per machine) for product support at my last company. It never got the press that Oracle did: they made the classic (beta, Xerox, TI, ...) mistake of assuming that just because they were technically superior that people would just flock to them. That, and you don't get the Informix consultants recommending the product like you do with Oracle - mainly because you don't need 'em around. 95% of the standard "Oracle add-on" products and services were either built in or not needed.

So since this was their most "simple" database, I have some pretty good feelings about it. One thing that would be interesting is that this will open up the code to their SQL optimizer. That's one area where Informix always truly rocked compared to pretty much everyone else outside of a lab situation. I don't know how much of it got into Cloudscape, of course.

More techincal background

[TheToon]

The Cloudscape homepage: Cloudscape
And more details with links to PDF documents: Features and Benefits

I would guess that mysql would be faster for simple stuff, but Cloudscape could give it a run for it's money with support for more complex SQL.

Wouldn't know how it compares agains postgresql...

Performance

[DuncanE]

Not really sure how it compares to mySql or postgres, but I loaded a 50+ million row table with a non index timestamp field to Cloudscape and MSSQL. Both took about 3 seconds to return a query returning a unique row (ie a row updated on a specific date and time) on this field on a 2ghz intel machine with 1GB RAM.

Firebird SQL was about the same. Next Im going to try HSQL.

I would be interested in anybody elses experiments?

Re:MySql Competition?

[jaaron]

While I haven't used Cloudscape in a very long time, I imagine this is more competition to other Java open source databases like HSQL, Axion, or McKoi.

Most of these databases are used by "embedding" them into an application (something not uncommon in Java programming), not as a standalone database server like Oracle or Postgres. Of course, like I said, it's been a long time since I looked at Cloudscape so it could have changed to be more of a standlone server.

I'm also surprised I haven't heard more about this in Apache, but I imagine it will first go through the Apache Incubator to sort out any legal issues and then end up somewhere in the Apache Database project. If anyone has more info, I'm interested to know.

Re:MySql Competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Slashdot runs MySQL. So saying that MySQL cannot run big webapps is a bit of an underestimation :-)

Anyway, personally, I see it more as a competitor to hsqldb, which is also an embedded java DBMS. Or sqlite, although the latter is written in C++. It has the potential to become popular as a DBMS embedded in applications, but I don't think it is usable as a real stand-alone DBMS, such as MySQL.

Re:MySql Competition?

[NineNine]

MySQL is definitely ready for heavy loads

You're right. After all, it performs so well for Slashdot...

Correction

[cdegroot]

Cloudscape was originally crated by Cloudscape, Inc. (I contracted for them at one time), which was later acquired by Informix.

At the time, it was a fairly complete and well-performing database with some nifty multi-database synchronization features, so even though I'm not involved in Java programming anymore this can turn out to be a quite interesting addition to Joe. A. Opensourcecoder's toolkit.

Re:Database written in Java?

[Tassach]

Java's reputation for slowness is based on a few factors, none of which is applicable here:

1. The GUI, partiuarly AWT, is horribly slow. This is unavoidable because there's no good (fast) way to do platform-independent graphics. However, since a database engine has no GUI components, this won't be a factor.
2. A lot of the perceived slowness of Java comes from the time it takes to load and initialize the JVM. This is a factor when launching a desktop app written in Java. However, since a db engine is a long-running (daemon) process, this is also not applicable in this case.
3. Early JVMs, particuarly before JIT (just-in-time compilation) took off, were indeed slow. Modern JVMs with JIT, once loaded, run (non-gui) Java code at a speed comperable to compiled C++. This is just 8 year old FUD that needs to die.
4. A database is almost never CPU bound. The very nature of databases causes them to be I/O bound -- I/O bandwidth (especially disk throughput) is almost always the limiting factor in database performance. Modern CPUs are so vastly over-powered for database work that even if it took twice as many cpu cycles to run the Java code as it would to run comperable C++ code, you'd still only be using a small fraction of the available CPU cycles. Excessive CPU consumption in a database is almost invaribly caused by user error -- poor schema design, missing indexes, poor SQL coding, etc.

Re:Database written in Java?

[LnxAddct]

You obviously haven't used java within the past 3 years or so.... Its speed on every platform I've developed on is no different then native speed, and in many scenarios its faster because of the many optimizations that java makes to your code and also from years of optimizing their own algorithms. This could be debated well... forever, but anymore if you need something faster then java then you should probably be using assembly. Speed and overall performance has only gotten better with the new 1.5 VM as well (It's now known as 5.0, and its still in beta but very useable).
Regards,
Steve

Re:Anybody used it?

[mauryisland]

I've been using Cloudscape 4.0 in a web environment for a couple of years now, with no database failures of any sort. Cloudscape has a good selection of utilities (bulk loader, CLI and GUI, etc.) It's picky about ANSI SQL, and it supports most of the SQL that I'm interested in, like nested queries, stored procedures, etc. I'm using it as an imbedded database (just presenting data, not writing anything while in production), so I can't speak to the speed in an OLTP environment, but for my purposes, I'm absolutely delighted with it.

Re:503 Service Unavailable

[LnxAddct]

Just remove your slashdot cookies and all is well again... go figure.
Regards,
Steve

P.S. Anyone know what the hell is going on over at Slashdot HQ?

Re:Anybody used it?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are a successful enterprise software ASP and used Cloudscape during our first 1.5 years before switching to a more robust database. Cloudscape powered our applications for 40+ customers globally. While it performed well given its small footprint, a huge problem for us was the fact that it does not release unused space -- the only way to do this is to run COMPRESS. With growing transaction volume we began running into random database balooning problems where the size of Cloudscape grew from 100MB up to 30 or 40GB depending on how long it was running. The fix required a COMPRESS command which takes anywhere from 1 to 48 hours depending on the size of the database and the amount of physical memory available.

Switching to Oracle and SQL Server eliminated this problem entirely. In addition, performance has been increased literally ten-fold just from the switch (no changes were made to our code or schema when this performance increase was measured).

While I would recommend Cloudscape for smaller, non-critical applications, it is not ready for real-world enterprise apps. I look forward to the improvements the open source community might bring -- from a cost perspective I'd certainly like to see us switch back someday.

Regards,
Matt