

DB Superstar Jim Starkley touts NuoDBs new patent - suprgeek
http://gigaom.com/cloud/database-superstar-jim-starkey-touts-nuodbs-new-patent/

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hendzen
This article is terrible. Not only does it fail to give any technical
information about the actual innovation being claimed, but it is also
factually incorrect as it lists the wrong date for the patent filing.

Here is the actual patent: <http://www.google.com/patents/US20110231447>

I'll write a longer reply when I have time to digest the legalese.

That said, Jim Starkley seems to be pretty patent-happy. Check out this one
from 2008, "Method and apparatus for generating web pages from templates" [1].

[1] - <http://www.google.com/patents/US7039658>.

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jandrewrogers
I waded through the patent (morning coffee reading).

After all of that, I am unable to discern the novelty, having designed and
implemented quite a few distributed database systems. The patent describes
boringly standard internals that can be found in many existing distributed
databases. In fact, I stood up a system on an EC2 cluster a couple years ago
that had remarkably similar internals to what is described in the patent.
Maybe I am missing something but I am skeptical.

The design described in the patent still has the same problems and limitations
that have plagued distributed OLTP systems for years. The patent appears to be
a minor rearrangement of standard architectural elements common to a lot of
distributed systems. What is described will work but I could buy equivalent
functionality from other vendors.

I was hoping for an interesting computer science-y technology but that patent
doesn't contain one. It appears to be a description of a particular
implementation of a conventional distributed transaction processing system.
What am I missing?

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MattRogish
" NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, which he finds to be an
oversimplification. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or
SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris said. He prefers to
compare NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up tasks to any number of
processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data
organized, accessible and safe."

I've been waiting for something like this. NoSQL products took a look at the
limitations of SQL DBMS products and (incorrectly) assumed that SQL was the
problem. SQL may be a _symptom_ of the problem, but the deeper problem is
conflating the logical and physical data model in SQL-based DBMS and also in
most NoSQL products. A "record" (however you define it) doesn't need to be
mapped 1-to-1 with the physical bits on storage, but for some reason (probably
because it's easier) virtually every product does so.

It doesn't matter what language you use to access your data, as long as the
underlying DBMS operates on solid fundamental principles of data management
(ACID, logical/physical orthogonality), you can have an innovative, pleasing-
to-use system.

Very interested to see what these folks come up with.

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jandrewrogers
Underneath the hood _all_ database systems contain the same basic elements: an
implementation of relational algebra operators and a concurrency control
mechanism. Even nominally "non-relational" databases, like graph databases,
are built on top of relational operator implementations (you say "graph
traversal" and I say "join recursion").

What has traditionally separated the NoSQL databases from the SQL databases is
that they implement a smaller subset of relational algebra e.g. the famous
lack of join operators. This gave them the latitude to throw out the SQL
interface and build interfaces that were more domain specific and a better
match for what some applications need to do.

Now we are starting to see new databases that are discarding the SQL orthodoxy
but with a relational algebra implementation that is as expressive as anything
found underneath a conventional SQL database. They could implement SQL if they
wanted to but there is less of a compulsion to do so than there used to be.
Hopefully this will lead to the best of both worlds.

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MattRogish
"NoSQL" projects have thrown out the relational baby with the bath water and
instead implemented their own data model (mostly made-up).

The Relational Model is (hugely simplified) predicate logic and set theory
combined with logical/physical data independence and integrity.

Relational algebra (selection, projection, union, etc.) are important but just
a part (very important, of course, as it gives us a sound theoretical
foundation to implement from) of the query language. The "Management System"
part of the "DataBase Management System" are the constraints, logical/physical
representation, data model, etc. - which IMHO represent the bulk of what a
DBMS ought to do.

What sounds interesting about Nuodb is that they've kept the sound relational
fundamentals and created something that is what the relational model has
espoused from the beginning. Or so it reads.

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Sambdala
"Now it also has a patent that gives credence to its claims that its elastic
database is truly innovative."

Regardless of any innovation NuoDB may bring, can this phrase really be
credibly stated, given everything we've seen in the patent arena?

Edit: and the article ends with this paragraph: "We all know technology
patents are tricky business — see GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts’ continuing
coverage of the raging patent troll epidemic — but it does show that NuoDB may
really be onto something here with its self-scaling elastic database."

However, no technical details are given as to what the innovations are, just
that the underpinning technology is so innovative that there weren't even
names for what they're doing.

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efnx
I read the quoted patent blurb and thought, "oh great, so now if I write 'A
multi-user, elastic, on-demand, distributed relational database management
system,' I have to deal with this dude suing me." I hope patents don't work
like that...

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alexro
Use this to be safe: "a multi-user, on-demand, sharded relational database"

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wmf
This is some pretty tone-deaf PR considering all the patent lawsuits that are
going on right now. If their database is as great as they say then this patent
won't make or break them.

