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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.'"

84 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. hah, talk about nonstarter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    3 minutes and no comments :)

    1. Re:hah, talk about nonstarter by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Slashdot uses the NoComment database. Comments are passe.

    2. Re:hah, talk about nonstarter by M0j0_j0j0 · · Score: 2

      This just made my day.

    3. Re:hah, talk about nonstarter by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

      A node failed and all the comments who's keys hashed to it were lost.

  2. Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Oracle = pain by CmdrPony · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, Oracle databases are about performance and features that other database solutions don't offer. They have always been. "There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects." not only holds true for this Oracle product, it's true for all their products. Yes, they cost a lot, but also offer things anyone else don't. Your website project will probably be ok with MySQL, but enterprises have different needs.

    2. Re:Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > but enterprises have different needs

      Yes, like PostgreSQL

    3. Re:Oracle = pain by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The problem is that PHB's buy Oracle thinking because it's "top of the line" it will just be great out of the box. Instead, it requires skillful tuning and fiddling to use effectively, but the PHB's don't want to pay for that aspect.

      It's almost like giving a Stradivarius violin to your neighbor's newbie kid and thinking that "because it's a Strad, it will make the kid sound good."

    4. Re:Oracle = pain by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Exactly, the boss doesn't pay $10/hr an hour for the CS grad who can't find a job elsewhere to tune it to handle 10 petabytes by the end of the business day for nothing.

    5. Re:Oracle = pain by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      That's less like Enterprise and more like Galileo.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    6. Re:Oracle = pain by jimmydigital · · Score: 1

      It's almost like giving a Stradivarius violin to your neighbor's newbie kid and thinking that "because it's a Strad, it will make the kid sound good."

      I like how you describe this... it makes perfect sense in a way that even a PHB can understand. But can I get that in a car analogy?

      --
      Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
    7. Re:Oracle = pain by CmdrPony · · Score: 2

      Even if you give an Lamborghini to an uncool guy, it doesn't get him woman or make him cool.. oh wait

    8. Re:Oracle = pain by rrohbeck · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    9. Re:Oracle = pain by amon · · Score: 1

      Nope. Postgres still requires that the developer and DBA actually talk to each other every once in a while, whereas Oracle does not. That's its primary value.

      --
      -- If you can't convince them, confuse them (Truman)
    10. Re:Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In what world do you live? Oracle DB is the only great product they have, the rest is complete and utter crap, and they don't even know how to maintain them. We've been trying for months now to get someone from Oracle to explain us why our OSB does not work as it should, and even the guy from engineering that they shipped over half the world was just as clueless as we are.Siebel has been going downhill ever since they purchased it. BRM has never worked in a large deployment. Fusion is still just a dream that doesn't really work, the list goes on...

      And you know what, it's because all the good engineers don't want to work at Oracle. Over the course of my current project, we've had three different consultants, the first two quit because they said the atmosphere is just awful and noone has a clue what's going on. And they are trying hard to hide that they have people leaving the company in droves, leaving people with very little experience maintaining software that they have no clue about.

    11. Re:Oracle = pain by sqldr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They are also about selling training course. The syntax for half of the commands is appalling. RMAN for example with its "copy control file from path1 to path2 whilst patting your head and then write home to your gran" attempt at plain english language is far too obtuse for what it actually does, which isn't much. It copies a control file and then does autobackup. Wow. Didn't need a paragraph of shakespeare.

      It's the same throughout. Then they can't even install the software without running a massive java app (I really don't want to go into too much detail about how much time it took to automate Oracle installs...)

      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.

      --
      I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
    12. Re:Oracle = pain by renegadesx · · Score: 2

      You haven't used Oracle RAC & ASM then haven't you?

      --
      Make SELinux enforcing again!
    13. Re:Oracle = pain by hey+hey+hey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    14. Re:Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That doesn't match the Oracle that i work at.

    15. Re:Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah, I'm not sure where you get that idea from about dbas and devs not being required to communicate... That's way off...

      What kind of world do you think you're living in?

    16. Re:Oracle = pain by durdur · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oracle is not "plug and play" for developers, far from it. But it is true that recent versions do a lot of auto-tuning, and you can get reasonable performance with not a lot of work (but that assumes you don't have a truly dumb design, and really high performance requires a DBA, for sure). Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.

    17. Re:Oracle = pain by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    18. Re:Oracle = pain by dave87656 · · Score: 1

      > but enterprises have different needs

      Yes, like PostgreSQL

      Thank you! My thoughts exactly.

    19. Re:Oracle = pain by dave87656 · · Score: 1

      Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.

      What is Oracle's superior locking model?

    20. Re:Oracle = pain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Vendor lock-in(g) :)

    21. Re:Oracle = pain by mangu · · Score: 1

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

      Oracle requires that the developer and DBA actually talk to each other all of the time. It's not like Postgres.

    22. Re:Oracle = pain by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 1

      Even if you give a Lamborghini to an uncool guy, who can't drive, he still isn't cool ...

      --
      Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    23. Re:Oracle = pain by durdur · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    24. Re:Oracle = pain by segedunum · · Score: 1

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

      ROTFL. That has to be some kind of joke.

    25. Re:Oracle = pain by dave87656 · · Score: 1

      Thanks. It would appear, then, that most other DB's, especially, I'm guessing, DB's like MySQL and Postgresql use page level locking, I'm guessing.

    26. Re:Oracle = pain by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 2

      In what world do you live? Oracle DB is the only great product they have, the rest is complete and utter crap, and they don't even know how to maintain them.

      Disclaimer: I work at Oracle. Your description does not match my experience.

      We've been trying for months now to get someone from Oracle to explain us why our OSB does not work as it should, and even the guy from engineering that they shipped over half the world was just as clueless as we are.

      I and my team use OSB every day (about 80/20 to Netbackup) to back up petabytes of data. The chances are very good you've encountered one of numerous hardware-related gotchas that can derail success with OSB. I like the product, but the hardware support can be a killer.

      Let me know the My Oracle Support number you filed and I'll take a look and see if I or my team might be able to chime in if we've seen the problem before.

      Siebel has been going downhill ever since they purchased it.

      I was part of the Siebel acquisition.

      In fairness, Siebel struggled because within a few months of acquisition, developers had to change focus. Previously it was almost-exclusively a Windows/Internet Explorer product, heavily tailored to that environment, including Windows on the back-end most often with AIX running DB2 for the database. The slowdown in Siebel development -- in my opinion -- was largely due to the huge Linux porting & HTML standardization effort.

      Today's Siebel runs on Linux middle-tiers with Oracle database under the hood. And its stability is better for it. Every time you use My Oracle Support, you're actually using Siebel.

      Additionally, you're seeing the results of that effort reflected in CRM Fusion. Of course the product has bugs, but we're eating our own dogfood every day and we're acutely aware of most of them!

      Fusion is still just a dream that doesn't really work, the list goes on...

      Wow, I must dream like every day. I support the boxes it runs on, I use the product, and so do tens of thousands of others. It's ambitious, and it was a huge effort, but I fully expect it to mop the floor with other products. We're using portions of it throughout many of our other enterprise products right now.

      And you know what, it's because all the good engineers don't want to work at Oracle.

      Really? I work with world-class teams every day that amaze me with innovations large and small. There are pockets of unhappiness, for sure, and now that the tech market is improving there are occasional defections. I've been here almost eight years now, and it's not for lack of options. I interview at least four times a year for other positions elsewhere. I choose to remain.

      Why? Great environment. Great commute. Incredibly intelligent co-workers. Highly-focused training in an area I love (storage & backup). Market pay. Lots more.

      And they are trying hard to hide that they have people leaving the company in droves, leaving people with very little experience maintaining software that they have no clue about.

      Depends on the team. I'm friends with people all over in tech, and right now the market is driving everyone job-hopping. Oracle is HUGE, so from what I can see it's just affecting us as much as anyone else... but with tens of thousands of employees, everybody knows somebody who's left recently.

      There were mass defections shortly before & after the Sun acquisition. I've been through numerous acquisitions with several companies, and it apparently comes with the territory. I don't see any more "droves" of people leaving than before. But Oracle's working a little harder to keep the good ones now that the tech job market has improved so much.

      To sum up... it's unfortunate you've had a bad experience with support on a few products. Rapid changes in our pro

    27. Re:Oracle = pain by durdur · · Score: 1

      For mySQL, it depends on the storage engine you are using. Postgres has row-level locks I believe but there are still some subtle differences in how Oracle does it.

  3. Press releases by nyctopterus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Press releases by rrohbeck · · Score: 5, Funny

      It could be worse - it could be an article about Agile.

    2. Re:Press releases by SomePgmr · · Score: 1

      I don't know what extreme programming is, but that really makes me want to buy some doritos and mountain dew.

    3. Re:Press releases by iceaxe · · Score: 1

      I found the article to be offensively biased, loaded with null-value emotionally charged language, and generally uninformative other than the couple of sentences that tried hard not to say "Oracle bought SleepyCat and re-wrote BerkelyDB with added features to avoid that whole open-source thing".

      Like the many other "NoSQL" products the author maligned and slandered, Oracle's new product may be great for the purposes it's intended for. The writer of the article is not.

      --
      WALSTIB!
  4. Re:Oracle is just to piss you off. by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    But that's when you turn back to Oracle to buy a real database. They know what they're doing.

  5. Google Patents? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)
    1. Re:Google Patents? by fsckmnky · · Score: 2

      It is my understanding, based on stuff ( sorry for the lack of specifics here ), that map/reduce was not in fact invented by google, by predates google by 30 or 40 years, and was simply re-discovered by google, according to some article I read sometime in the past that unfortunately, I cannot recall now. I dont think this has been challenged at all, however, and googles patent could still indeed be valid, depending on details.

    2. Re:Google Patents? by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 1

      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.

      Sure it's been said. By those who don't know what they're talking about.

      Patent licensing -- in my opinion -- would be somewhere very near the bottom of any reason for acquiring Sun. It was, plainly put, a great deal at a great time, and some huge innovations have already come out of it. Just a few:

      * Exadata V2. Many times the power for Oracle Database for much reduced power, space, cooling, and price compared to the V1 offering with HP. I'm seriously blown away by how much performance these things can put out... and we have hundreds side-by-side here in the data center where I work. Sun hardware made the difference, and it's gotta be seen to be believed.

      * Sun/Oracle 7000-series NAS appliances. I'll be the first to admit they got off to a rocky start, but since the 2010Q3.4 release they've been solid and high-performing in mirrored and triple-mirrored configurations. ZFS on RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 definitely needs some work to improve IOPS for OLTP loads, but mirrored configs really cook under anything but the most extreme high-data, low-IOPS loads we can throw at it.

      * Oracle Secure Backup on Sparc. We had to go this route to get the I/O performance we need to back up the world's largest Oracle databases. Nothing else had what it took; x86 just couldn't keep up with the I/O to dozens of T10000 T2 tapes simultaneously.

      Sun hardware is making this and many other things possible. End-to-end custom-tailoring our apps onto custom-built hardware has enabled performance gains we only dreamed of five years ago.

      Disclaimer: Yes, I work for Oracle. By choice, not necessity.

  6. Obligatory by acjacinto · · Score: 5, Funny

    We're looking for Oracle NoSQL DBAs with 10 years of experience --recruiter

    1. Re:Obligatory by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      Just your lucky day! I happen to have experience in NoTruth.

    2. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm your man. I have 15 years of Oracle experience with no SQL (I'm still trying to configure this f***ing DB and haven't been able to run a single request yet)

    3. Re:Obligatory by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      Pffft. I got 15 years of Oracle NoSQL, even 12 years of interfacing it with HTML5.

    4. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Perfect; I myself have no SQL experience, neither with Oracle's products or anyone else's.

    5. Re:Obligatory by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I have 10 years experience with NoSQL Oracle DBMs as well as 7 years of HTML 5 experience with IE 6

    6. Re:Obligatory by Detaer · · Score: 1

      I actually know a guy who wrote a nosql distributed datastore 10 years ago.

    7. Re:Obligatory by Rolman · · Score: 1

      That's why you write your résumé like this.

      --
      - Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
  7. Re:Oracle is just to piss you off. by Lokitoth · · Score: 1

    lacking basic things other databases do without issue.

    Then you should probably not be using NoSQL

  8. Opinion: Complete failure of Oracle security respo by SmurfButcher+Bob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  9. Berkeley DB by genjix · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Berkeley DB by Anrego · · Score: 1

      At a minimum it probably costs a lot more.

      Also maybe it was the subversion side and not the Berkeley DB side, but from my experience using Berkeley DB with subversion, I don't think I'd want to use it for anything else.

    2. Re:Berkeley DB by Korin43 · · Score: 1

      BerkeleyDB is an embedded database (doesn't run as a server on your network unless you write your own server for it), and it's not particularly fast.

    3. Re:Berkeley DB by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 4, Informative

      BDB is an in-process key-value store. It's limited to being accessed by a single process, and has much more limited replication ability.

      This is a server based product ; your client communicates with servers using a driver. It's "eventually consistent", meaning that changes take time to propagate across the replication axis, so not all clients see the same picture (although with this one, you can influence the ACID-ity of atoms of data by grouping them on "major" keys).

      The advantage is mostly scalability. You can throw more servers at it to provide more capacity, and the software will do a lot of the work to ensure that this works. If you want more capacity on BDB, you need to throw a bigger chunk of iron at it.

      The other major difference ; the open-source license (Sleepycat) for BerkeleyDB is copyleft. Despite the name, it's not released under a Berkely Software Distribution style license - Oracle dual license it and you have to pay a commercial license fee to distribute products based on it without releasing your own sources.

      The Community Editor license file for Oracle NoSQL from the distribution lists a number of licenses, all of them BSD-style - new BSD and Apache 2.0 ; in certain quarters this will be greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm. The only difference between the Community and paid editions is the support.

    4. Re:Berkeley DB by fatp · · Score: 1

      Actually this is a repackaged Berkeley DB Java Edition. See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/learnmore/nosql-database-498041.pdf

  10. Re:Oracle is just to piss you off. by PickyH3D · · Score: 1

    And they're going to call you every other day to make sure that you do too, while they try to pitch every service that they sell and weasel to other people within your group or company to do the exact same thing.

    Oracle makes a pretty spiffy database, but they have been about the worst company that I have ever dealt with.

  11. False dichotomy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:False dichotomy by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      You sir do not webscale

  12. Re:Missing the point by Desler · · Score: 1

    Since when was that EVER the point? You're the first one I've ever heard use that reason.

  13. hey, did they rip me off??? by swschrad · · Score: 1

    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?
  14. Practically ACID by mandelbr0t · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Practically ACID by Lord_Naikon · · Score: 2

      No sharding solution can guarantee consistency in the event of node failures, unless you completely block writes or reads until the nodes are back up. It's great that they bind a key to a particular server, but I can think of several other NoSQL solutions which do the same thing. Basically everything that uses hashrings and do lookups based on that. Oracle NoSQL is hardly unique in that respect.

  15. NoSQL = Lotus Notes database by kbg · · Score: 1

    If I understand NoSQL correctly it looks to me like they just reinvented the Lotus Notes database concept.

    1. Re:NoSQL = Lotus Notes database by styrotech · · Score: 1

      I think the guy that wrote CouchDB was a Notes developer.

    2. Re:NoSQL = Lotus Notes database by mini+me · · Score: 1

      CouchDB, yes. It took a lot of its design ideas from Lotus Notes.

      NoSQL databases in general, however, follow all different kinds of paradigms and designs. You can't make any blanket statements about them because they all were born out of the need to solve completely different problems.

  16. New enterprise project = stodgy by default? by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 1

    '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?

    1. Re:New enterprise project = stodgy by default? by ADRA · · Score: 2

      How about: "Not suitable for High-school kids looking to write their first database application"
      or
      "Not for mere morons"
      or
      "Not suitable for enthusiasts"

      It seems like of silly. For playing around with K/V based systems, on the low end, you can throw something together with bubblegum and gumption without much concern about reliability, concurrency, or scaling. If you are a large project with a non-trivial set of requirements, the learning curve on a solution should be far less important than the effective output of the system in production. Now I've never used Oracle's NoDB solution (or any NoSQL solutions for that matter) but I'd reserve judgement until its actually in your hands to see how it works with your development practices.

      Personally, I was obsessed with the concept of NoSQL in development until I realized just how much heavy work systems like Oracle do for effectively free using relatively simple SQL expressions. Maybe if I ever work on huge volume or huge scale systems, my tone may change, but in my typical enterprise scale systems (tables under 10mil rows) I haven't seen the need for anything else.

      --
      Bye!
  17. Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "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.

  18. Re:Opinion: Complete failure of Oracle security re by ADRA · · Score: 1

    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!
  19. Re:Missing the point by bhcompy · · Score: 1

    Pfft, multivalue(PICK) was never lost. Just requires you to be leet.

  20. Re:Missing the point by FlyingGuy · · Score: 1

    At fucking last someone who knows something.

    PIC is just insanely fast at what it does and it does what it does in ways no one has picked up on.

    Last version of the PIC OS I worked on was OEM'd by the now defunct Ultimate Computer Corp.

    --
    Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
  21. Re:Oracle is just to piss you off. by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Fortunately they mostly skip the techies and harass the executives instead (who don't ask thorough questions).

  22. TFA F'd in the Ass, Oracle Lied by curmudgeon99 · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. The Brilliance of 'MapReduce' Is Overblown by curmudgeon99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The Brilliance of 'MapReduce' Is Overblown by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  24. Re:Missing the point by bhcompy · · Score: 1

    I'm going to start dickering around with OpenQM.. hopefully somewhat comparable

  25. Sharding by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

    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;
  26. Software Patents by neoform · · Score: 1

    Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.

    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!
  27. Oracle vs Postgres by mcrbids · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:Oracle vs Postgres by Doc+Hopper · · Score: 1

      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.

      You nailed it. Postgres is a superb product, and a stellar example of open-source done right. Incredibly flexible, incredibly tough, easy to use for a newbie yet powerful enough for an expert, and an all-around winner. But if someone is going to shoot themselves in the foot, Postgres (and MySQL) gives them the gun & bullets.

      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.

      If I hadn't already participated in this discussion and therefore couldn't moderate, I'd totally mod you up for that. Very insightful comment.

      However, I don't necessarily agree with you implication that Oracle mainly seeks to minimize damage over maximizing performance or capability, nor do I agree that the focus of the databases are the primary differences. Your comment above is simply one of those statements that really *feels* true, even if you couldn't point out the truth on a comparison spec sheet :)

      Disclaimer: I work for Oracle; my opinions are my own, and not those of my employer.

  28. Be afraid. Be very afraid... by tigersha · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:Be afraid. Be very afraid... by kbg · · Score: 1

      Yes Lotus Notes shines for some concepts like document work flows, for example it is possible to create a generic work flow application and add work flow to any other Lotus Notes application with a one line include. Imagine trying to add a generic work flow application to some random SQL database table, it would be a major problem. However for large databases, speed, data integrity and transactions then Lotus Notes doesn't fair well in comparison.

  29. Re:Missing the point by FlyingGuy · · Score: 1

    I would want it at the OS level like the original. The operating system is the database and the database is the operating system.

    it has been so long since I have even touched it I would have to take a crash course. D-basic was pretty cool put I think it would be nice to have something *like* C or FreePascal ported onto it.

    Just watch your overflow frames!

    --
    Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
  30. Re:Missing the point by jedidiah · · Score: 1

    Anyone that's been to University and taken a class that covers this sort of thing should already "know something". They tend to talk about more than just the industry flavor of the month.

    That's the great thing about a more theoretical CS program.

    A lot of stuff in tech is not nearly as new as most people (even in the field) think it is.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.