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.'"

Comments

hah, talk about nonstarter

[Anonymous Coward]

3 minutes and no comments :)

Oracle = pain

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Oracle = pain

[Anonymous Coward]

> but enterprises have different needs

Yes, like PostgreSQL

Re:Oracle = pain

[rrohbeck]

Most of all they're about lock-in => $$$ => Larry's yachts.

Re:Oracle = pain

[hey hey hey]

And before you ask - we're running the 6th busiest Oracle database in Europe - according to Oracle themselves - running across 4*128 SSD drive arrays at a cost of millions.. and for the 3 or 4 features we need to justify the licenses instead or designing our way out of the same problem, at times I really wonder about the hassle, especially when our data is so important and locked up into such a bloated closed up mess.

You might think such things as a fun fantasy, but you would be insane to actually do it. When it (say) turns out your home grown solution corrupts records spanning odd page boundaries, you will be quite sad as you and the one other guy who has a clue how your "clever hack" functions gets to work 24hour days trying to debug the problem, determine the extent of the damage, and try and figure out a solution. It is times like that when having thousands of consultants, and a major corporation with teams of dedicated programmers ready to jump on your problem (for a price, certainly for a price) is the only sane option. If you are really as big as you say, your data is WAY to valuable.

I may not be fond of Oracle either as a corporation or as a product, but there are reasons it rules in the enterprise DB niche.

Re:Oracle = pain

[Just Some Guy]

Postgres still requires that the developer and DBA actually talk to each other every once in a while, whereas Oracle does not.

s/requires/allows/, because as far as I can tell Oracle legally obligates the two parties to communicate through layers of upper management before the DBA can so much as add an index the developer needs.

Re:Oracle = pain

[durdur]

What is Oracle's superior locking model?

Oracle uses row-level locks only, and unlike for example MS-SQL or Sybase, will never escalate lock scope to the block or table level. It does not have any limit on the number of rows that can be locked during a transaction.

If you have a mostly-read application this may not matter, but it matters a lot if you have a high update frequency from multiple clients.

You can try to relax the transaction isolation level in MS-SQL to get greater update performance but that does not then provide the same degree of isolation as Oracle.

Press releases

[nyctopterus]

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.

The Brilliance of 'MapReduce' Is Overblown

[curmudgeon99]

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.

Re:The Brilliance of 'MapReduce' Is Overblown

[bill_mcgonigle]

MapReduce is too simple for all acclaim. It's too obvious.

Yeah, we did these in first-year algorithms class - they called them scatter/gather at the time. Google's insight seems to have been doing this with key/value pairs and making it an n-stage operation for application-independent parallelization.

Which, of course, the USPTO threw a patent at. So, here were are, stuck with it until 2024. Yay, government.