NoSQL Central Articles
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