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Brian Aker On the Future of Databases
blackbearnh recommends
an interview with MySQL Director of Technology Brian Aker that O'Reilly Media is running. Aker talks about the merger of MySQL with Sun, the challenges of designing databases for a SOA world, and what the next decade will bring as far as changes to traditional database architecture. Audio is also available. From the interview: "I think there's two things right now that are pushing the changes... The first thing that's going to push the basic old OLCP transactional database world, which... really hasn't [changed] in some time now — is really a change in the number of cores and the move to solid state disks because a lot of the... concept around database is the idea that you don't have access to enough memory. Your disk is slow, can't do random reads very well, and you maybe have one, maybe eight processors but... you look at some of the upper-end hardware and the mini-core stuff,... and you're almost looking at kind of an array of processing that you're doing; you've got access to so many processors. And well the whole story of trying to optimize... around the problem of random I/O being expensive, well that's not that big of a deal when you actually have solid state disks. So that's one whole area I think that will... cause a rethinking in... the standard Jim Gray relational database design."
I recently blogged on this, but essentially, as long as your average PHP developer thinks of MySQL as a glorified flat file system to place their serialized PHP objects, an always-available, pay-as-you-go distributed database is going to revolutionize application development in the coming years. For those that want to keep control of their data, HBase is coming along quite nicely.
Umm I'd say you have it wrong - "Traditional" databases have many different lock granularities, such as Table locks, page locks and row locks. SQL server and Oracle certainly do this.
MySQL only does table locks, which are much simpler and much faster for light workloads, but as I'm sure you can imagine when you have many CPUs trying to update the table at once in the end each thread has to wait their turn to grab the lock and perform their updates sequentially.
In SQL Server, Oracle, or any other "enterprisey" db multiple threads can update the same table at exactly the same time, as long as its not the same row.
Stuff like this is exactly why people who use MS-SQL and oracle look down their nose at people who use MySQL and claim it is capable of playing with the big boys.
Once again, despite what MySQL are saying there is nothing innovative here. All this stuff has existed in the mainstream database engines for many, many years and they are still playing catchup.
What you say is true for MyISAM tables, but MySQL's InnoDB tables fully support row-level locking. And I believe their BDB tables support page-level locking.
Had to comment, the reference to Jim Gray was a little weird? I was lucky to work with Jim and we were often talking about technology changes and enhancements. Now - see what for example Tandem did call "massively parallel" database! The system was already built to allow several cpus and several nodes to interconnect transparently, Jim did see how that could be used and how the database optimizer really could work. Of course making direct access to any disc faster will help, especially now when the SDD's are getting bigger but the theory is nothing new. Even SQLite can show you that and think systems where you have 32, 128 or even 256 bit flat, memory speed but storage backed world - will change the picture, or? But be careful, we have already gone through many iterations making part of the system faster, as fixed head disks and even indexing in solid state, and found that it may (will) create other problems, not always seen upfront (except by JG!)