NoSQL Central Articles
Jaded IT professionals and managers, as well as market analysts, weary and wary from decades of overblown analyst claims about emerging new technologies, "paradigm shifts" and "enchanted quadrants," will take heart in a new series of Unisphere Research studies being released over the next several months. The first of these, "The Post-Relational Reality Sets In: 2011 Survey on Unstructured Data," has just been released, and tackles the current dimensions and impact of unstructured data on enterprise IT practices, technologies, policies, purchasing priorities and the evaluation of new technologies.
Posted June 22, 2011
Both HBase and Cassandra can deal with large data sets, and provide high transaction rates and low latency lookups. Both allow map-reduce processing to be run against the database when aggregation or parallel processing is required. Why then, would a merge of Cassandra and Hadoop be a superior solution?
Posted June 08, 2011
SnapLogic, a provider of application integration software, has introduced a solution aimed at enabling easy connection and reliable large data integration between business applications, cloud services, social media and Hadoop. The product, called SnapReduce, transforms SnapLogic data integration pipelines directly into MapReduce tasks, making Hadoop processing more accessible and resulting in optimal Hadoop cluster utilization. "This is Hadoop for humans," says Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of SnapLogic.
Posted May 25, 2011
RainStor, an infrastructure software company specializing in online data retention (OLDR), today announced that RainStor 4.5 can be deployed using Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop. "We are focused on storing and retaining data in its original form but at a much lower priced footprint than you would do with a normal relational database or a data warehouse or, in this particular case, even if you ran it on low-cost commodity hardware in Hadoop," Ramon Chen, RainStor's vice president of product management, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 24, 2011
Teradata Corporation has announced the launch of the Aster Data SQL-MapReduce Developer Portal, a collaborative online developer community for SQL-MapReduce analytics, an emerging framework for processing non-relational data and ultra-fast analytics. "The new Aster Data SQL-MapReduce Developer Community helps bring MapReduce analytics to a broad audience of data scientists and quantitative analysts, helping organizations more easily leverage the power of MapReduce without sacrificing the familiarity and broad ecosystem support for standard SQL," Jon Bock, director of product marketing for Teradata, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted May 10, 2011
DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra, today released Brisk, a second-generation open source Hadoop distribution that the company says eliminates the key operational complexities with deploying and running Hadoop and Hive in production. Brisk is powered by Cassandra and offers a single platform containing a low-latency database for high-volume web and real-time applications, while providing tightly coupled Hadoop and Hive analytics.
Posted May 09, 2011
Starcounter, based in Stockholm, Sweden, has announced its patent-pending VMDBMS technology, which the company says is designed to improve database performance. According to the company, the key features of Starcounter is that it is a general-purpose transactional database (OLTP), ACID-compliant, memory-centric, object database, with SQL support.
Posted May 03, 2011
Citrusleaf, a new database technology company, has officially launched and announced Citrusleaf 2.0, which the company describes as a different type of NoSQL database that combines the best practices of both database and distributed technology. Simultaneously with the product launch, the company, which was founded in 2009 by Brian Bulkowski, CEO, and Srini Srinivasan, CTO, also announced Series-A funding from Alsop Louie Partners, Kalpathi Investments and Draper Associates. The funding will be used to enhance products, expand the team, and support growing vertical market customers in the advertising, financial, government and healthcare sectors.
Posted April 26, 2011
Queplix Corp., a provider of data virtualization software, has introduced new Application Software Blades for Hive, HBase and Cassandra. Queplix's Application Software Blades enable the Queplix Virtual Data Manager platform to connect to many different source applications and data. According to the company, the new software blades for NoSQL databases can identify and extract key metadata and associated security information from the data stored within these databases, then bring it into the Queplix Engine to support data integration with other applications.
Posted April 12, 2011
"Big data" has emerged as an often-used catch phrase over the past year to describe exponentially growing data stores, and increasingly companies are bolstering their product lines to address the challenge. But helping companies manage and derive benefit from the onslaught of mainly unstructured data has consistently been the focus for MarkLogic Corporation, whose flagship product, MarkLogic Server, is a purpose-built database for unstructured information. The company, which has roughly 240 customers in industries, including media, government and financial services, today announced Ken Bado as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. "Unstructured data, literally and figuratively, is huge. Clearly, 80% of the data that is generated every day by all of us is unstructured. The question is: How do you deal with it?" Bado tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted April 05, 2011
Digital Reasoning, a provider of solutions for complex, large-scale unstructured data analytics, announced it has been issued a U.S. patent for its distributed system of intelligent software agents for discovering the meaning in text. The invention enables the extraction of meaning from text as humans do - by analyzing concepts and entities in context. According to the company, the software learns as it runs, continually comparing new text to existing knowledge. Associated entities and synonym relationships are automatically discovered and relevant documents are identified from across extremely large corpora.
Posted April 05, 2011
The relational database is primarily oriented toward the modeling of objects (entities) and relationships. Generally, the relational model works best when there are a relatively small and static number of relationships between objects. It has long been a tricky problem in the RDBMS to work with dynamic, recursive or complex relationships. For instance, it's a fairly ordinary business requirement to print out all the parts that make up a product - including parts which, themselves, are made up of smaller parts. However, this "explosion of parts" is not consistently supported by all the relational databases. Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 have special, but inconsistent, syntax for these hierarchical queries, while MySQL and PostgreSQL lack specific support.
Posted April 05, 2011
10gen, a company that develops and supports MongoDB, has announced version 1.8 of the scalable data store.The latest version of MongoDB adds several new features, including journaling that allows for fast recovery in the case of a crash, support for covered and sparse indexes, and incremental map/reduce. In addition to these new features, 10gen says it continued to invest in MongoDB's performance and scale-out capabilities, with improvements to replication and sharding in this newest release.
Posted March 29, 2011
Membase (formerly NorthScale) and CouchOne have joined forces to create Couchbase, a provider of an end-to-end family of NoSQL database products. The merger will enable a lineup of data management capabilities built with Apache CouchDB document database technology, memcached distributed caching technology and the Membase data flow and cluster management system.
Posted March 01, 2011
Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced that Sybase IQ v.15.2, its column-oriented analytics server, working with the IBM POWER 780 Model 9179-MHB server and running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Operating System (OS), achieved the best overall performance results among non-clustered systems for the TPC-H benchmark at 1 TB scale factor.
Posted February 22, 2011
Quest Software has unveiled support for Apache Hive in its two free NoSQL tools, Toad for Cloud Databases and OraOop. Additional enhancements include Eclipse support in Toad for Cloud Databases, and full support for Oracle RAC in OraOop. According to Billy Bosworth, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Database, Quest Software, Quest is adding adding functionality and additional platform support for Toad for Cloud Databases and OraOop almost in tandem with new demands it sees in the market. "Right now, we're seeing very strong adoption of the Hive system in conjunction with Hadoop, and we think the ability to store the output of Hive analytic queries in Oracle will benefit our customers by allowing them to integrate Hadoop data with traditional business intelligence solutions."
Posted February 08, 2011
Salesforce.com is well known as the pioneer of software as a service (SaaS) - the provision of hosted applications across the internet. Salesforce launched its SaaS CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product more than 10 years ago, and today claims over 70,000 customers. It's less widely known that Salesforce.com also has been a pioneer in platform as a service (PaaS), and is one of the first to provide a comprehensive internet-based application development stack. In 2007 - way before the current buzz over cloud development platforms such as Microsoft Azure - Salesforce launched the Force.com platform, which allowed developers to run applications on the same multi-tenant architecture that hosts the Salesforce.com CRM.
Posted February 02, 2011
There is a wealth of information, connections and relationships within the terabytes and petabytes of data being collected by organizations on distributed cloud platforms. Utilizing these complex, multi-dimensional relationships will be the key to developing systems to perform advanced relationship analysis. From predictive analytics to the next generation of business intelligence, "walking" the social and professional graphs will be critical to the success of these endeavors.
Posted February 02, 2011
DataStax (formerly Riptano), has unveiled DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra. A platform for managing, monitoring and operating enterprise Cassandra applications, DataStax OpsCenter provides Cassandra users with an advanced operations environment bundled with support for their real-time, high-volume, and low-latency applications. "Our customers are finding that anywhere that scale of data and real-time responsiveness are a challenge, Cassandra is proving to be the answer," said Matt Pfeil, CEO and co-founder, DataStax. "With DataStax OpsCenter we're giving these customers the confidence and control they need to deploy Cassandra for their most important applications."
Posted February 01, 2011
Jaspersoft today released software to support a variety of Big Data sources for business intelligence reporting. With the release of more than a dozen connectors as part of its open source "Big Data Reporting" project, as well as beta connectors for selected Big Data proprietary databases, Jaspersoft delivers native reporting for Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP analytic databases.
Posted January 25, 2011
The NoSQL acronym suggests it's the SQL language that is the key difference between traditional relational and newer non-relational data stores. However, an equally significant divergence is in the NoSQL consistency and transaction models. Indeed, some have suggested that NoSQL databases would be better described as "NoACID" databases - since they avoid the "ACID" transactions of the relational world.
Posted January 07, 2011
Karmasphere has introduced Karmasphere Analyst, productivity software for data professionals working with massive data sets. "Karmasphere is focused on providing software for developers and analysts to work with Big Data in Hadoop clusters. Over the past 12 months, we have been introducing products specifically focused on developers who are early adopters of Hadoop and are working on Big Data in Hadoop, but what we have heard time and time again from enterprise organizations is the need to unlock access to data in Hadoop clusters for enterprise analysts," Martin Hall, CEO of Karmasphere, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted December 21, 2010
Because any database that does not support the SQL language is, by definition, a "NoSQL" database, some very different databases coexist under the NoSQL banner. Massively scalable data stores like Cassandra, Voldemort, and HBase sacrifice structure to achieve scale-out performance. However, the document-oriented NoSQL databases have very different architectures and objectives.
Posted November 30, 2010
Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, has announced the release of Sybase IQ 15.3 to beta customers. The new release introduces the PlexQ Distributed Query Platform, a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that accelerates highly complex queries by distributing work to many computers in a grid configuration. GA is planned for the first half of 2011.
Posted November 17, 2010
Calpont Corporation has announced InfiniDB Enterprise 2.0. According to Calpont, InfiniDB is a powerful and reliable platform for data professionals who need rapid and easy access to data, scalable data capacity, or the need to augment or replace their traditional RDBMS technologies. "Our technology is a pure 100% columnar architecture and we have scale out capabilities which means we support a massively parallel processing paradigm and those are really the two key things that make this new generation of analytic databases so powerful," Nick Ochoa, vice president of marketing, Calpont, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted November 16, 2010
There has been a lot of interest lately in NoSQL databases and, of course, many of us have strong backgrounds and experience in traditional relational "SQL" databases. For application developers this raises questions concerning the best way to go. One recurring truth that eventually surfaces with all new software technologies is that "one size does not fit all." In other words, you need to use the right tool for the job, as each has its own strengths and weaknesses. In fact, a danger of many new architectural approaches is one of "over-adoption" - using a given tool to address a wide array of situations when originally they were designed for the specific problem domain in which they excel.
Posted November 09, 2010
Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software and Cloudera, a provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, yesterday announced at Informatica World 2010 that the two companies are partnering to provide customers with the solutions needed to address the challenges associated with managing large-scale data, including structured, complex and social data. Together, Informatica and Cloudera say they intend to bring the productivity benefits of the Informatica Platform to the data-intensive distributed computing capability of Hadoop.
Posted November 02, 2010
MarkLogic Corporation has introduced a major new version of its flagship product, MarkLogic Server, a purpose-built database for unstructured information targeted at customers in three verticals: media/publishing, government, and financial services segments.
Posted November 02, 2010
The relational database - or RDBMS - is a triumph of computer science. It has provided the data management layer for almost all major applications for more than two decades, and when you consider that the entire IT industry was once described as "data processing," this is a considerable achievement. For the first time in several decades, however, the relational database stranglehold on database management is loosening. The demands of big data and cloud computing have combined to create challenges that the RDBMS may be unable to adequately address.
Posted October 12, 2010
InterSystems Corporation has rolled out a new version of its Caché high-performance object database. The new release targets the growing demand by CIOs for economical high availability by introducing database mirroring, while also addressing Java developers' need for high-volume high-performance processing combined with persistent storage for event processing systems. Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president for software development, recently chatted with DBTA about the release and the new features it offers. Commenting on the growing interest in NoSQL databases, Nagle observes that many of the beneficial characteristics people see in NoSQL are in fact true of Caché - a flexible data model and zero DBA cost. "But for us, what is unique is that it is not NoSQL, it is that it needs to be SQL - without the overhead of relational technology - because I think SQL is extremely important for almost every class of application that is deployed."
Posted October 12, 2010
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was granted the gift of prophesy, but cursed with an inability to convince others of her predictions - a sort of unbelievable "oracle," if you like. Ironically, in the database world, the Cassandra system is fast becoming one of the most credible non-relational databases for production use - a believable alternative to Oracle and other relational databases.
Posted October 12, 2010
NoSQL - probably the hottest term in database technology today - was unheard of only a year ago. And yet, today, there are literally dozens of database systems described as "NoSQL." How did all of this happen so quickly? Although the term "NoSQL" is barely a year old, in reality, most of the databases described as NoSQL have been around a lot longer than the term itself. Many databases described as NoSQL arose over the past few years as reactions to strains placed on traditional relational databases by two other significant trends affecting our industry: big data and cloud computing.
Posted August 10, 2010
Objectivity, Inc., a provider of data management solutions, has released the first version of its enterprise-ready distributed graph database product, following a successful beta program which began earlier this year. InfiniteGraph enables large-scale graph processing, data analytics and discovery, and supports the leading requirements of organizations seeking valuable connections in data and information, and building advanced systems and services around social networking, business intelligence, scientific research, national security and similar efforts.
Posted August 03, 2010
Quest Software, Inc. has introduced a beta program for Toad for Cloud Databases, a new data access and management tool for non-relational data stored in cloud databases, also known as NoSQL databases. Toad for Cloud Databases is intended to help users unlock data stored in the cloud by using the familiar SQL language or Toad's popular visual query and data access capabilities. Users can query and report on non-relational data, migrate data in both cloud and relational databases from one to the other, and create queries that combine the two.
Posted July 07, 2010
VoltDB, LLC, has begun shipping the VoltDB OLTP database management system that is intended to offer faster transaction processing capabilities due to lower overhead. VoltDB, developed under the leadership of Postgres and Ingres co-founder, Mike Stonebraker, is a next-generation, open source DBMS that, according to the company, has been shown to process millions of transactions per second on inexpensive clusters of off-the-shelf servers. The VoltDB design is based on an in-memory, distributed database partitioning concept that is optimized to run on today's memory-rich servers with multi-core CPUs. Data is held in memory (instead of on disk) for maximum throughput, which eliminates buffer management. VoltDB distributes data - and a SQL engine to process it - to each CPU core in the server cluster. Each single-threaded partition operates autonomously, eliminating the need for locking and latching. Data is automatically replicated for intra-cluster high availability, which eliminates logging.
Posted June 07, 2010
CodeFutures Corporation has introduced the latest version of its dbShards, which provides cost-effective database scalability and performance using database sharding. The company also announced that Familybuilder, a fast-growing family application on the internet is using dbShards to keep up with the demands placed on its high-volume MySQL database, while simultaneously scaling to meet anticipated future growth.
Posted April 20, 2010
If you spend any time at all reading IT trade journals and websites, you've no doubt heard about the NoSQL movement. In a nutshell, NoSQL databases (also called post-relational databases) are a variety of loosely grouped means of storing data without requiring the SQL language. Of course, we've had non-relational databases far longer than we've had actual relational databases. Anyone who's used products like IBM's Lotus Notes can point to a popular non-relational database. However, part and parcel of the NoSQL movement is the idea that the data repositories can horizontally scale with ease, since they're used as the underpinnings of a website. For that reason, NoSQL is strongly associated with web applications, since websites have a history of starting small and going "viral," exhibiting explosive growth after word gets out.
Posted April 07, 2010
The concept of database sharding has gained popularity over the past several years due to the enormous growth in transaction volume and size of business-application databases. Database sharding can be simply defined as a "shared-nothing" partitioning scheme for large databases across a number of servers, enabling new levels of database performance and scalability. If you think of broken glass, you can get the concept of sharding—breaking your database down into smaller chunks called "shards" and spreading them across a number of distributed servers.
Posted August 14, 2009
Database sizes have grown exponentially, with more than half of all databases in use globally projected to exceed 10TB by 2010, according to The Data Warehouse Institute. But as the size of data warehouses has exploded and business requirements have forced companies to conduct more ad hoc queries on those warehouses, response times have slowed, requiring increasingly expensive database hardware investments.
Posted May 15, 2008
The data explosion driving data warehouse equipment purchases in the last few years has just begun. Equipment proliferation already pressurizes data center energy requirements. Fortunately, a column-based analytics server can help companies with both kinds of green - the environment and money - by offering enormous energy and cost reductions while significantly boosting performance.
Posted February 15, 2008