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First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'"
3 minutes and no comments :)
Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects
Oracle databases aren’t about fun, they are about pain. Severe pain. The kind of pain where you scream so loud in your mind at night that it wakes you up. Pain which you only endure if you need the power they offer over all the much more palatable alternatives available, or need support and/or the perception of not using “some freeware database” in the case of large bureaucratic enterprise.
All that said, this actually sounds like a good idea, and from what the article describes, it sounds like a good product. It will of course be painful to use, but I can see this catching on in the “serious performance/reliability” and “large enterprise with compulsive need to spend” groups, especially as NoSQL becomes a buzzword.
It might perform well but holy shit you will spend all your time using it being annoyed that it's lacking basic things other databases do without issue.
I know that a lot of submissions are inevitably going to be based on press releases (it's straight from the horses mouth so to speak), but do they have to be so blatantly biased? Could we have some sort of editorial? The last sentence of this post make me want to vomit.
Anybody know how broad Google's map/reduce patents are?
It's been said that the whole reason Oracle bought Sun was to clobber Google with the Java patents so they could cross-license the map/reduce patents and get back to an Oracle database that could scale.
Regardless, corporations should just release their software and fight it out in court later (sorry, real people, you can't play) but now that this is out, things might get more interesting in the patent wars.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We're looking for Oracle NoSQL DBAs with 10 years of experience --recruiter
So Sayeth Litchfield:
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Oct/56
'nuff said
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
How does this differ to the key-value Berkeley DB key-value store which is around 10 years old, free software, widely used and tested, full ACID compliance AND it's owned by Oracle.
I thought the driver behind NoSQL databases was not that projects can't be implemented with classic database.. Its that NoSQL style implementations can do it far more cheaply.
Oracle is not a name one usually associates with "Low Cost"
Is it just me or does this article present a false dichotomy? I enjoy using NoSQL, but I'm not running out and replacing every SQL db with Mongo. NoSQL is just another tool available to me, and I leverage it when it makes sense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's these nosql things. I am not familiar with them at all. They seem nifty - some of you are way smarter than me, maybe you can correct me. It's like a giant bag with stuff in it, and there are keys tied to all of them hanging out the top of the bag. You just yank on the key and get your thing out. It's massively parallel and redundant, so maybe given enough leeway that bag can span continents, and we can each grab a key marked "file1.blah" and get it reasonably fast. It's got nothing to do with file systems. Am I right so far?
But so then, what I wanna figure out is, how can I set up a thing where I can basically have a file system be mounted locally on a few boxes, and have all that data get replicated on the other boxes as close to realtime as is reasonable... latency, resource sharing, all that. I'd basically like it so that me and my friends can each have the same data locally. We have tons of space, tons of bandwidth (it's local, after all), and we are willing to trade these to each have fully local copies. But what should we use? Lustre? Gluster? There seems like quite a few options. Lustre looks hard and Gluster looks expensive.
Chime in fellow slashdotters. You're all that make this place interesting anymore.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
So basically they did not do anything new - it's another "me too" from Oracle. They start saying how other NoSQL stores cannot guarantee consistency, but they themselves can't either - of course, ACID is in the garbage once you start partitioning (due to the CAP theorem). And transactions are handled by atomic operations in other stores.
There really is nothing new here... just more hype from Oracle on a product that's no better than what's already there (others are better supported due to their large _open_ development communities)
"Oracle stole the intellectual property from these groups"
Because I heard MongoDB is web scale [NSFW].
sounds like they ripped off my "write-only" algorithms from college. no SQL, indeed,.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The serious part of Oracle NoSQL is a practical approximation of ACID compliance, the standard that SQL databases like to offer.
If this claim holds up, then its easy to see where Oracle could come out ahead of other NoSQL databases. TFA mentions that this practical approximation is dealt with by arranging the cluster machines in two axes: the replication axis and the sharding axis. Along the sharding axis, each major key is guaranteed to be tied to a single machine. Since there is only one record to be updated, there is no "eventual consistency" problem. The replication axis is responsible for making multiple copies of that data. If full ACID compliance is desired, even along the replication axis, there are plenty of options for ensuring that the write is complete before calling the transaction complete: the master node is updated, a majority of replicated nodes are updated, or all replicated nodes are updated.
This approach seems to take the best of both worlds in the NoSQL arena: sharding, which is the approach used by MySQL cluster, and replication, as used by pretty much every other NoSQL store available. Of course, if you have a fuck-ton of data, you'll also need a fuck-ton of machines. This is not a server you will be testing without considerable resources at your disposal.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
If I understand NoSQL correctly it looks to me like they just reinvented the Lotus Notes database concept.
'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role.
Restated: Oracle started a new project from scratch, but still managed to make the code look like it had been maintained by a megacorporation for a decade, like other long-term Oracle and Sun projects?
"Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance"
REALLY?
Now others' ideas can be borrowed in the clusterfuck of regulated UNnovation that the USA is? Great news!
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% behind Oracle in this thing of Borrowing Ideas, I think that's the only way to unstuck innovation, but I'm a little bit skeptical about Oracle playing nice if someone borrows their ideas.
Is there anything more recent than 6 years ago to look at? Most NoSQL DB's haven't even existed that long, so I fail to see the correlation. To assume that a bad (or good) support and maintenance never changes quality is ridiculous. How are their products that I'm actually buying today?
Bye!
The person who wrote this article was an idiot. First of all, it describes several brilliant innovations Oracle brought to the table:
It's a key-value store I guess they have to steal that idea to join the category.
Consistency can be throttled so that a write does not complete until it has gone to one, a quorum or all replication nodes. Duh! For years that has been a feature on nearly every incumbent NoSQL DB such as CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others.
It allows you to attach a version number to an object. Duh! again. Another common and central features in CouchDB.
I cannot understand why MapReduce has been turned into such a holy creation. The idea could not be simpler: you have a big dataset? Break it apart into pieces that are free of external dependencies, process the pieces in parallel and then aggregate the matches from the processed pieces.
This is not Hadoop, with its elaborate application plumbing or CouchDB with its curious use of MapReduce as part of its querying system.
MapReduce is too simple for all acclaim. It's too obvious.
Does it do sharding? Is it WebScale?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Whew, thankfully there's no such thing as software patents, which means we can have actual innovation and improvements... oh.. wait, software patents exist in this timeline.. damnit!
MABASPLOOM!
There is more than one way to skin a cat - a sad truth for cats the world over. Postgres combined with commodity hardware and database joining extensions like dblink allow you to partition data across dozens (or hundreds) of commodity servers, allowing you to provide massively parallel access to massively large datasets without compromising performance. The cost is developer competence.
The trick is to have a decent abstraction layer and technologies that commoditize cross-database querying, something my company has spent considerable time developing, with rather striking success.
Postgres is an amazingly capable software system and its performance in the Enterprise space is really only limited by the quality of the developers using it. The difference between Postgres and Oracle seems to be on focus: Oracle seems to seek limits to the damage caused by idiot developers, while Postgres (seems to) seek to maximize the capabilities of competent developers. It's an exercise to you to decide which approach is more productive in the long haul.
PS: I'm in the PostgreSQL camp.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yes. Yes.
And my 10 wasted years as a Notes admin trying to fix the !@#!@ that a PHB made us do in Notes instead of a relational database really makes me very wary of this whole noSQL boom.
NoSQL Databases are definitely good for some things (as is Notes) but it is certainly no Nirvana. There is a reason relational databases were invented in the first place: a schema forces you to be consistent with your design which helps with large projects. In Notes and noSQL things very quickly become a tangled mess, and when you need foreign keys, well, you need them.
Good design is always about LESS freedom. That lesson seems to be getting lost here.
And now back to my new job where the people upstairs want to introduce Lotus Notes!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
So, basically, a hashtable (key/object pair) on a permanent storage device.
Am I missing anything?