

Oracle NoSQL Database - vetler
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/index.html

======
Maro
Disclaimer: I'm the competition.

It's basically BerkeleyDB Java edition, probably BDB High Availability (HA)
Edition with some layers on top.

They're doing pre-sharding with ranges mapped onto replica groups, which are
probably BDB HA instances. Since BDB supports transactions, they claim
transaction support. But it only works if your keys fall in the same replica
group (see other comment in thread). (Nothing wrong with that.)

There's no mention of shard migration, so they probably don't support it right
now. (Shard migration is hard to get right.)

It's Java only.

BDB HA uses something which is said to be like Paxos, so they're claiming that
(although they only mention it for master election), but they also have other
consistency modes, which is interesting.

Looking at the plots:

Running on 32 replica groups (96 nodes) they were able to get 350K insert/sec,
which is ~10K/s per replica group, with 1K values that is 10M/s per replica
group. That means the local BDB instances just wrote everything to the log
files, good luck with that. That's assuming they were running BDB in
transactional mode, which is the only mode that actually keeps your database
intact in case of a crash.

According to the 10M/s figure, it should have taken them 1.8 hours to load the
data. According to the latency number, it should have taken 91 hours, so one
of them is wrong. Probably the latency numbers, they were probably batching
~100 inserts and that's what the latency numbers are for.

In my NoSQL startup, our first product used BDB as the disk backend. In our
second product iteration, getting rid of BDB was one of the major driving
forces. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

~~~
revertts
This might be too business sensitive to answer, but what did you replace BDB
with as your disk backend? Build your own, LevelDB, or other...?

BDB certainly has its problems, but I still haven't found a better
alternative.

~~~
leef
Our in-house solution uses InnoDB (via MySQL even, not directly) and find it
to be much more stable and performant than BDB for a number of key/value
workloads.

------
dchest
Download page is a perfect trollwork:

    
    
       Oracle NoSQL Database, Community Edition
    
       The Community Edition is licensed under an open source    
       license. Please see the license file in the downloaded 
       release for details.
    

Okay, I can read the license agreement once I download it. Let's download...

    
    
       Oracle NoSQL Database, Enterprise Edition
     
       You must accept the OTN License Agreement to download this 
       software.
       ( ) Accept License Agreement |  ( ) Decline License Agreement
    

To download the license I have to agree to it without reading.

    
    
       Download files to be available soon. Please check back in mid-
       October.
    

Oh, so I can't even download it.

------
siavash
I find this kind of amusing 1\. May 2011 Oracle writes a white paper on why
NoSQL is not reliable and future proof for serious business [1] 2\. Removes
the original the document [2] 3\. Releases their own own NoSQL db

[1]
[https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:G4pI4ZOkzWYJ:...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:G4pI4ZOkzWYJ:www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/debunking-
nosql-
twp-399992.pdf+oracle+debunking+nosql&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiaUPuEdyJ9cnDc_GzgsfsNq6UytDZeO5f0pgDJyUeo7x-xfe2W091nseq4s1cIl9lZ79jmGT0TRpE5PF8svROWbJSjcbrm6TXb2AWfM2TaAa6Z80dEupN3oSFzZG6y9mWBsgTd&sig=AHIEtbSXOrH6n87xP4yC4bqqMaLHSMBBNg)

[2] [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/debunking-
nosql-t...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/debunking-nosql-
twp-399992.pdf)

~~~
cheald
"Do you really want to be contributing to an open source effort?" dropped my
jaw when I read it.

The paper is basically "You should pay us lots of $$$ because you're dumb."

------
LeafStorm
Calling your key-value store "NoSQL Database" is like calling your high-speed
train "Non-Car Transportation." (It could also describe boats, planes,
zeppelins, buses depending on whether you think they count as cars or not...)
This post, as well as that other post about why you _shouldn't_ use a NoSQL
database, suggests that Oracle as a whole is completely missing the point of
NoSQL.

~~~
Maro
I don't really understand why calling a key-value database a "NoSQL database"
is incorrect in your opinion. It's one of the many data models (or lack of)
that falls under this umbrella term in 2011.

~~~
sep
The name "NoSQL" doesn't give much technical insight into the product, so why
name it so?

Marketing, I'd say. It's a very buzz-y term.

~~~
Maro
It's not supposed to. It's supposed to position the product in the market.

------
rbanffy
"Oracle NoSQL Database, the one you don't need"

------
purephase
I'm guessing that this post is in response to this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3066022>

Well played.

~~~
VladRussian
"Download files to be available soon. Please check back in mid-October. "

just as i wanted to ask whether anybody knows was it developed by Oracle or
bought from outside. I guess the correct answer - they will buy it as soon as
somebody develops a scalable transactional key-value store with replication,
failover and transparent partitioning support. Btw, how about making some good
money by hacking such a store in the next 2 weeks :)

------
colinhowe
Interesting that it has transaction support... I don't believe many of the
mainstream NoSQL options support transactions.

Having had the joy of installing an Oracle database in the past I nearly spilt
my tea when I read "Easy Administration"

~~~
Maro
"Oracle NoSQL Database supports the ability to bundle a collection of
operations together using the execute method, providing transactional
semantics across multiple updates on records with the same Major Key Path."

In other words, ot supports transactions as long as the key-values are on the
same replica group (as they call it). That's easy for them, since they just
run a BerkeleyDB HA instance per replica group, and that supports
transactions.

------
rgiar
Random sidenote: I haven't downloaded but if this is a community version of
Oracle Coherence (nee Tangasol) it might be reasonably badass. As an ex-oracle
employee, I've heard the insider view from friends that unlike most oracle in-
house or acquired software, Coherence is the real deal, scales as advertised,
and except for the $100k per enterprise box price-tag, should have taken the
storage world by storm.

------
bitops
I half expected this to be an Oracle database that only allowed you to create
tables with two columns.

------
OllieJones
Is this the successor to BerkeleyDB? Sure sounds like it.

~~~
dchest
Correct,

    
    
      "Oracle NoSQL Database  is build upon the proven Oracle 
       Berkeley DB Java Edition high-availability storage engine"
    

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/learnmore...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/learnmore/nosql-
database-data-sheet-498054.pdf)

