

In-memory databases threaten Oracle's dominance - razorburn
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081003_005424.html

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sutro
"Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work _and rapacious libido_ ,
databases are to be found everywhere."

This statement raises a few questions about the Oracle sales process.

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jhancock
Most web apps will never reach the level of scale that cannot be handled by a
well coded app with well managed centralized atomic data stores (RDBs being
the most prevalent).

If you are building something with tons of content (video, images, pages that
rarely change) you won't store this in an RBD, but your other data can
certainly be managed well with one.

I've seen lots of poorly written apps which in turn have severe RDB
bottlenecks. But this doesn't mean the RDB itself needs to go away. It you
need atomic commits (and most apps do for some aspects of the app), an RDB is
a good choice.

Besides, Oracle isn't even on the radar of most web apps; which go with MySQL
or PostgreSQL. This article is mostly gibberish.

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jwilliams
Ok - well this is an interesting article in many respects - but it really
brushed over the concepts around transactions.

His bank transfer example is a bit oversimplified. A well designed database
can have very fine grained locks that avoid that kind of thing. Big Banks will
run intraday work on something like IMS Fast Path and reconcile later.

So - I don't think his examples are actually all that great - I think the
better examples are literally hordes of websites out there using databases.
These are a better target. If you running a forum you don't necessarily need
the concurrency and casuality of a transactional database.

What traditional databases do give you is a metaphor that is established, well
known, easy to deploy, etc, etc. You can use SQL Server and be sure it's
supported on your host, and that you can find people to program for it. Until
the cloud space settles more in this respect (years away) this is still going
to be very compelling.

Interesting to watch the trend either way.

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zhyder
How well does MySQL Cluster work; anyone have experience? Are there any other
free (as in beer as well as freedom) in-memory databases?

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alecco
MonetDB and many others are already available.

Their research last year on running on Cell (Playstation 3) was mind-blowing.
Haven't seen anything even close to that anywhere.

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newt0311
Yeah... Until people more to Oracle shared nothing RAC and then... problem
solved.

Databases can scale. Just that the ones which do currently cost on the order
of several million USD/yr. When that changes, the stigma associated with them
will go.

PS. Well designed concurrency (ie. PostgreSQL MVCC and not MySQL MyISAM) does
not create false data dependencies unless those are in the table constraints.

~~~
wmf
Maybe you haven't heard: In Web 2.0, only free databases exist. Clustered
relational databases can't exist, because if they could, the open source
community would have already written one. Can I interest you in yet another
sharding tutorial?

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newt0311
"Google has THE ENTIRE INTERNET IN MEMORY AT ONCE"

Do they? really? or is that a gross oversimplification which clouds the facts
to the point of meaninglessness as I suspect it is.

I am not qualified to say whether that is actually possible but it seems
doubtful.

~~~
jwilliams
My understanding is that the search index (at least) is all in memory - Even
if you're talking about just the index hashes, that's a lot of memory.

I doubt that the actual content is - given the Google model there would be no
point.

~~~
shimon
I think there is perhaps a point in the text highlighting, where it shows you
an excerpt from the page containing your search terms. To do that they need
either a very complex index (or to optimize for the most popular queries) or
full page text in-memory.

Google has a lot of computers.

~~~
jwilliams
You could do that at the point you render the result... and only after the
page scored highly enough. That wouldn't necessarily need to be in memory to
perform.

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quasimojo
haha what a crock by a sad hack who continues to rely on sensationalism (go
read his archives, when has he ever been right?)

guess what folks, lots of people care about transactions. the "scaling" crowd
balks at any notion of referential integrity v. performance because the fact
is, what is in their databases isn't really important. if you run an airline
booking system, stock order fulfillment system, credit card transaction system
etc etc etc., you have real money riding on the integrity of the database.
these people have been using oracle and its rdbms competitors for decades and
will be using them decades from now, or something that provides the same
integrity level. the notion that these systems will be replaced by shmem or
sqlite or some other cub-scout retrieval system is absurd

