Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable) alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.
Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.
> Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs
There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really.
If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload.
And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company.
Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.
Toshio, your comment below is [dead] so I can't reply, but the databases vary from 10's of GB to multi-TB depending on their use.
The DBs are often very write intensive on the master, with as much reading as possible done on slave databases, with tables heavily normalised to try and reduce the disk performance hit.
Most of the extremes of the setup are there for legacy performance reasons - The newer systems using SQL Server 2008 or 2012 and SSD drives generally don't need it, and we're moving towards a less normalised setup.
Also, since the entire discussion started by me questioning the reliability of sql server, can you say how many days your database server stays up between reboots?
Agree. TSQL is painful compared to pl/sql. But SQL Server has always been solid in my experience. That may be because it came from outside Microsoft (Sybase) but by now I'm not sure how much of the original implementation is still in the product.
Oracle's query interpreter, for example, is extremely anal, you have to commit everything and Oracle is likely to reject your queries if they are slightly off, which helps catch errors.
SQL Server follows more of a "Do What I Mean" approach, even going as far as to perform implicit type conversions for you, which is fine until it guesses wrong. Then, instead of rejecting your query, it screws up your data.
And don't tell me I can configure it to behave differently, it should work correctly out-of-the-box.
I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there.
If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.
As much as I dislike Oracle, this article is pure crap. It's only general speculation with no information or value. Then it starts talking about Datastax like they are the ones causing these (made up?) problems for Orcale.
It couldn't happen to nicer people... After my last upgrade of the Java virtual machine on my laptop, I found the installer had kindly installed the Ask toolbar on all my browsers, too. It left me with quite the bad taste in my mouth.
This is obviously a PR article. Oracle is not just a database company anymore. Comparing Oracle to a 100 people company does not make much sense either.
I don't even know if it's that Oracle has slowed, but rather their product has become too complex for them to sustainably innovate. They tried acquiring other options for the low end, but it hasn't worked. (Berkeley DB is theirs, for example.)
That said, there will always been a need for the product Oracle provides in the largest of companies. NoSQL isn't going to be running reports on the fortune 500 anytime in the next two decades, and neither is Postgres, as much as I like it.
Death by a thousand cuts will probably still be profitable for decades.
I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on.
Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce.
But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type workloads.
Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.
Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board.
Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase.
Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop.
That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the game.
I'm not so sure. I've worked multiple places where they fully took advantage of big iron. Data from one department fuels three other departments, who in turn fuel parts of reports for six more. Could it be done with a series of ETL jobs to feed data around the organization? Possibly, but I wouldn't want to architect it.
Along with their own database and operating system a la IBM.
It's a good model to be spread over multiple segments: hardware/software/services. Bad quarters in one segment are usually covered by good quarters in another.
Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database, analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.
See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of Oracle.
Unless I made a mistake, Datastax was mentioned 11 times in an article about the "bleeding" of Oracle. Now Oracle has a gazillion other competitors so I am wondering.
Considering how ethical Techcruch is...let's not say it.
