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Streaming a Database in Real Time
Roland Piquepaille writes "Michael Stonebraker is well-known in the database business, and for good reasons. He was the computer science professor behind Ingres and Postgres. Eighteen months ago, he started a new company, StreamBase, with another computer science professor, Stan Zdonik, with the goal of speeding access to relational databases. In 'Data On The Fly,' Forbes.com reports that the company software, also named StreamBase, is reading TCP/IP streams and using asynchronous messaging. Streaming data without storing it on disk gives them a tremendous speed advantage. The company claims it can process 140,000 messages per second on a $1,500 PC, when its competitors can only deal with 900 messages per second. Too good to be true? This overview contains more details and references."
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is
Just to let everyone know this is not the only product or even the first product to do this.
Another option is EPL server by ispheres . Unlike the product mentioned here, which seems to be just some extra code thrown on top of a database EPL server is built from the ground up for this sort of application.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The idea sounds a lot like the software I develop. We sit on a server-peer network, and process messages - without ever hitting disk. We can query state information out of the network, even though most traffic is dynamic and not stored past initial processing and resending. Two parts to our software, I guess. State data and traffic. Pretty impressive peice of software I think. Maintaining the network state is far more difficult than most people realize. We generally keep around 100 megs of state in RAM, more depending on the traffic levels. My software has been around, in various incarnations, since the 80s.
Its called IRC.
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Oh, and 140,000 messages on a $1500 PC sounds a little low accually. We handled 40,000 -sockets- on an AMD Duron 900Mhz. Each socket recieved a few messages per second, and we were recieving far more from the uplink.
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This isn't streaming, it's standard message queuing. Most messaging products allow you to have non-persistent queues and allow you to extract data based on arbitary queries. There are well over a decades worth of products for doing this kind of stuff.
I'm sure this is a great product, but both the submitter and the writer of the story seem to not grok what makes it great.
sigs are a waste of space
It's just that if you start querying AFTER you store it on disk, the I/O makes it much more slower. So what you do is pick up some of the information from the flowing data, and some other system behind yours saves the data.
Every time you get some thing interesting, you save that on disk too - but separately, into a much smaller db. This way state is also saved, and since state is going to be much smaller than the data, there will be no speed issues.
Now the clever thing to do would be to link this flowing-state dbms (FSDBMS) to a standard rdbms working from the disk. Then you could verify the information from the FSDBMS, and ensure that things aren't screwed up. Also, based on patterns seen by the rdbms with long term data, new queries could be generated on the FSDBMS, allowing it to generate results from the data on the wire.
Sounds like it would have applications primarily where response time is at a premium, and long history is not such a large component of the information.
So in the case of military info, where a HumVee could be in trouble (a situ someone else has mentioned), the FSDBMS would raise the alarm, and some other process would then follow up and ensure that the alarm was taken care of.(The data itself would be backed up for future analysis, such as whether the query was correctly handled).
Dynamic queries in such a situ could be - get the id of the closest Apache reporting in, or closest loaded bomber en-route to some other target. Then the alarm handling program would re-route the bomber/apache to the humvee for support. While querying the disk database may be time intensive, the FSDBMS would have delivered a sub-optimal FAST solution.
So imagine the FSDBMS as a filter, giving different bits of information to different people. With the option that you could change the filter on the fly. And the filter could be complex, based on previous history etc., just like a DB query.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
I asked him why so many Roland articles get accepted, and he said he doesn't even look at the submitter's name and that Roland must be submitting good articles.
I then told him about the controversy over it in posters' minds, and he said it was just a "new successful troll meme." Good luck getting through to Slashdot's editors, because clearly Malda does not consider this anything to take seriously.