Slashdot Log In
Database Bigwigs Lead Stealthy Open Source Startup
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Feb 14, 2007 04:17 PM
from the hope-it-isn't-vaporcorp dept.
from the hope-it-isn't-vaporcorp dept.
BobB writes "Michael Stonebraker, who cooked up the Ingres and Postgres database management systems, is back with a stealthy startup called Vertica. And not just him, he has recruited former Oracle bigwigs Ray Lane and Jerry Held to give the company a boost before its software leaves beta testing. The promise — a Linux-based system that handles queries 100 times faster than traditional relational database management systems."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Database Bigwigs Lead Stealthy Open Source Startup
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 187 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Partners (Score:5, Informative)
(http://thepeckfamily.us/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 10, @10:49AM)
also interesting is the wikipedia article on Michael Stonebraker [wikipedia.org] if you aren't already familiar with him.
Re:Partners (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
It's called "hedging your bets". If the little company doesn't work out, no big deal. If it does, then HP is in a position to either benefit from contractual relations, acquire it, or squash it. Whichever happens to be their fancy.
Column oriented databases (Score:2, Interesting)
How does this differ than KX System's kdb (www.kx.com) which IIRC is similar in that way; and is alredy in use at many if not most major financial institutions (see their customer list)?
Re:Column oriented databases (Score:5, Informative)
When Will This Be Ported? (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone, we are moving to ASP now (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.ducktapeandglue.com/)
You're bound to get some strange looks... (Score:5, Funny)
it's fast, but can it penetrate enemy airspace? (Score:1)
(http://www.gmail.com/)
Yeah, but what does its radar signature look like?
buzzword enabled (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 08 2005, @04:33PM)
What does that mean?
If anything.
Re:buzzword enabled (Score:5, Informative)
Stonebraker, Mike; et al. (2005). C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS [mit.edu] (PDF). Proceedings of the 31st VLDB Conference.
From the paper:
Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of columnoriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures
Re:buzzword enabled (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, a spreadsheet?
Re:buzzword enabled (Score:5, Informative)
Re:buzzword enabled (Score:5, Informative)
Grid enabled - This means the DBMS can make use of a large distributed group of computers and potentially have access to a huge amount of computing power. The typical DBMS runs on at beat a multi-processor server. Thi sis kind of like a DBMS server running a a "seti at home" type network.
Going solely by the developer's reputation, this could be a big deal. He is not some random hacker. He is a well known university professor who has several times in the past lead projects that have been revolutionary and turned the field around. His ideas are widely used Still "100X faster" is a big claim. Lots of smart people have been working on DMBSes for many years, a two order of magnitude improvement is a "I will have to see it to believe it" type claim
I'm using PostgreSQL to handle some telemetry data right now. If my 45 minute run times can be reduced to seconds, I'll be happy.
Big claims are backed (Score:4, Informative)
(http://virtualraider.livejournal.com/)
Oh ye of little faith, here i present thee with The Facts. Or a paper at the very least: One size fits all? a Benchmark [mit.edu]
Re:buzzword enabled (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
1. Make up lots of 100-column+ tables
2. Select one column from each table
3. If you're IO bound, you should now see about a 100:1 increase
However, most real data models don't work that way. Usually you put stuff that's useful at the same time in the same table, in which case it probably won't make much of a difference.
Column oriented? (Score:2)
(http://www.westxylophone.com/)
Seriously, though, the target market for grid-based high volume data-warehousing type dbs are a lot smaller than the MySQL crowd. Not as big a deal as it seems, but it'd be nice to have if you needed it.
Re:Column oriented? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.intelligentblogger.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 27, @11:47AM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS [wikipedia.org]
It's basically an optimization of the current data access patterns. Databases have been row-oriented for decades, because they evolved from fixed width flat files. Once we eliminated COBOL-style accesses to databases, the full row data became less important. It became far more important to be able to scan a column as fast as possible. For example:
select * from names where lastname LIKE '%son'
The above query might have an index available to find what it needs. But it's just as likely that the database will need to do a table-scan. Since table-scans involve looking through every record in the database, you can imagine that it would be faster to just load the lastname column rather than loading every row in the database just to discard 90% of that data.
Re:Column oriented? (Score:5, Insightful)
Column oriented is easy. Imagine a database as a set of tables, each of which has rows of data records, in organized columns (column 1 = "User name", column 2 = "User ID", column 3 = "Favorite slashdot admin", etc).
Normal row-oriented databases store records which have a row of the data: "User name", "User ID", "Favorite slashdot admin" for user row #12345.
Column oriented databases store records which have a column of the data: "User name" for user rows 1-100,000; "User ID" for user rows 1-100,000; etc.
Updates are faster with row-oriented: you access the last record file and append something, or access an intermediate record file and update one "row" across.
Searches are faster with column-oriented: you access the record file for "Favorite slashdot admin" and look for entries which say "Phred", and then output the list of rows of data which match. Instead of going through the whole database top to bottom for the search, you just search on the one column. If you have 100 columns of data, then you look through 1/100th of the total data in the search. To pull data out, you then have to look at all the column files and index in the right number of records, but that goes relatively quickly.
Indexes are useful, but column-oriented is more efficient in some ways. You don't have to maintain the indexes, and can just automatically search any column without having indexed it, in a reasonably efficient manner.
Column-oriented also lets you compress the data on the fly efficiently: all the records are the same data type (string, integer, date, whatever) and lists of same data types compress well, and uncompress typically far faster than you can pull them off disk, so you can just automatically do it for all the data and save both speed and time...
Awesome (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.sevenl.net/ | Last Journal: Sunday January 16 2005, @12:15AM)
With comodity hardware getting faster and cheaper by the minute, having a system that can handle a higher than average load with optimized software is, imho, a winner.
I'm sure everyone here can add some anecdotal evidence to how they had a heavy-hardware, database serving machine die on them because of some software bug.
This is one of the reasons I've been looking forward to ZFS. Hopefully the DB guru's will take the best of what's good about software, drop the legacy crap and really deliver something that's going to handle the kind of load that a good slashdotting delivers with hardware that didn't require a lease to be affordable.
open source? (Score:1)
But does it save the children? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Perfect timing (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://michael.bacarella.com/ | Last Journal: Friday November 01 2002, @06:19PM)
Loading a million random records out of a set of one hundred million records is an enormously difficult task for an RDBMS on commodity hardware (e.g. magnetic rotating disks). This is a more common task than you would think. ORM systems backed by an RDBMS, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Hibernate, have exactly this requirement and will only demand more as these models become more mainstream. Think about what search engines have to do: find millions among billions, all to show a user a dozen.
These problems are solvable now, but there's a lot of duplication of effort going on that a smart database vendor could solve for us.
Good..If it works (Score:1)
(http://www.divinenatureflowers.com/)
Doesn't "stealthy" require some stealth anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is some new Network World definition of "Stealthy", apparently...
Sounds great but.. (Score:1)
(http://www.zazzle.com/ervkosch | Last Journal: Thursday September 26 2002, @08:07PM)
I can claim my custom written DOS database system is 20X faster then anything on the market(which it is), but if it can't easily work in a Windows and/or Linux (which it can't) then it worthless as marketable product. (But you should see what it can do on a serial network.)
Re:Sounds great but.. (Score:4, Informative)
Note: I work for Vertica
Best of luck (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @08:33AM)
What happened to Gallium Arsenide replacing silicon? What happened to solid state memory completely repalcing magnetic disks? Technology field is littered with such fiascos.
Patent Problems (Score:3)
open source? (Score:2)
In any case, if people wonder how they get 100x speedups, it's probably related to Stonebraker's previous company called Streambase [streambase.com].
Why does a company promising Linux solutions... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday December 01 2006, @10:51AM)
Speculation (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that Stonebraker is the company founder. Stonebraker has contributed extensively to database research over the years.
He's known for advocating the "shared-nothing" approach to parallel databases. The shared-nothing approach means that nodes in the parallel database don't attempt memory or cache synchronization, and each node has its own commodity disk array. In a shared-nothing parallel database, the data is "partitioned" across servers. So, for example, rows with id's 1-10 would be on the first server, 11-20 on the second server, etc. Executing the SQL query "select * from table where id < 1000" would send requests to multiple commodity servers and then aggregate the results. The optimizer is modified to take into account network bandwidth and latency, etc.
My guess on what they're doing: they're working on a shared-nothing parallel RDBMS with an in-memory client similar to Oracle TimesTen.
The are a few drawbacks to the shared-nothing approach: 1) the RDBMS software is more difficult to implement; 2) since the data is partitioned, any transaction that updates tuples on more than one database node requires a two-phase distributed commit, which is much more expensive; and 3) some queries are more expensive because they require transmitting large amounts of data over the network rather than a memory bus, and in rare cases that network overhead cannot be eliminated by the optimizer.
The advantage, of course, is linear scalability by adding commodity hardware. No more need for $3M+ boxes.
I've been waiting for something like this ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Classic RDBMSes are crutches. A forced-upon neccesitiy we have to put up with for our app models to latch on to real world hardware and it's limitations. A historically grown mess with an overhead so huge it's insane. With a Database PL and 30+ dialects of it from back in the days when we flew to the moon using a slide-ruler as primary means of calculation.
If what they claim is true, these guys are probably finally ditching the omnipresent redundant n-fold layers user and connection management in favour of a lean system that at last does away with the distinction of filesystem and database and data access layer. Imagine a persistance layer with no SQL, no extra user management, no extra connection layer, no filesystem under it and native object suport for any PL you wish to compile in.
I tell you, finally ditching classic RDBMSes is *long* overdue, they're basically all the same ancient pile of rubble, from MySQL up to Oracle. If these guys are up to taking on this deed (or part of it) and they get finished when solid-state finally relieves our current super-slowpoking spinning metal disks on a broad scale we'll feel like being in heaven compared to the shit we still have to put up with today.
I wish these guys all the best. They appear to have the skills to do it and the authority to emphasise that todays RDBMSes and their underlying concepts are a relic of the past.
My 2 cents.
Given that... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
By which I am asking that while Vertica is obviously well-researched and well funded as a start up, MonetDB is well-researched, already benchmarked and available now.. So why would I wait to invest my time, energy, and $$ in a proprietary future product rather than the time and energy, etc. to develop market leadership in my chosen corporate area in the present?
Re:Given that... (Score:5, Informative)
Here are a few of the technical reasons one might choose Vertica over Monet; I'll not get into business issues.
Vertica is designed for large amounts of data, and is optimized for disk based systems. Monet does benchmarks against TPC-H Scale Factor 5 (30 million records, an amount which would fit in main memory) running on Postgres; Vertica does TPC-H Scale factor 1000 (6 billion records) against commercial row stores tuned by people who do such work to make a living.
Vertica runs on multi-node clusters, allowing the cluster to grow as the amount of data grows, while Monet doesn't scale to multiple machines.
There are numerous differences in the transaction systems, update architecure, tolerance of hardware failure, and so on, that make Vertica better suited to the enterprise DW market.
Note: I work for Vertica
Comprable? (Score:2)
(http://web.mac.com/r.../Site/Blog/Blog.html | Last Journal: Monday October 16 2006, @05:58PM)
Google uses this approach (Score:3, Informative)
More Scalability (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
In other words, instead of yet another incompatible database, how about one that we could just switch to from an existing one, that is arbitrarily scalable against shared data. If you're going to get clever and act like you can solve hard problems, why not give people what we need, and not just what you think you can give us?
This is a commercial version of MIT C-Store (Score:4, Informative)
- Web site: http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/ [mit.edu]
- Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store [wikipedia.org]
They distribute the source with a fairly liberal license, so this looks like something the open source community could pick up and run with.
An issue with column orientation (Score:2, Informative)
BTW, first post, I am no longer an eavesdropper, yay
Josh
Stealthy? (Score:2, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 06, @02:39PM)
The interesting to me is... (Score:1)
I wonder if it's anything like Daytona? (Score:1)
Required technologies? (Score:1)
Stupid question: Still SQL? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://print-bingo.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 04 2003, @12:43AM)
Microsoft or Linux? (Score:1)
So it's like an Index... (Score:1)
MonetDB does not need stealth (Score:1)
follow the MonetDB approach to exploit column-based stores
for large scale datawarehouse solutions.
Its science library provides many studies on the underlying
technology.
MonetDB has already build a business history in the
area of analytical CRM solutions available through SPSS.
In the area of datamining PROXIMITY is a leading
product for relational mining.
Not to mention the support for both SQL and XQuery
engine support. This all in the context of an open-source
community activity for several years.
See http://monetdb.cwi.nl/ [monetdb.cwi.nl]
http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/Developmen
Very promising for SOME applications (Score:2)
(http://www.monash.com/blogs.html)
* Pinpoint data lookup doesn't seem like a great fit for columnar systems. Indeed, traditional rows-and-B-trees would seem to be best.
* Constrained query and reporting would seem to be a sweet spot, even though it's a sweet spot for some of the best competition as well.
* Cube-filling calculations involve big intermediate result sets. I'm not sure that's a great fit for columnar systems.
* Hardcore tabular data crunching would seem in many cases to be another sweet spot, again against a lot of competition, at least in some of its sub-categories.
* Text and media search are best done by specialized systems that, at least in the case of text, wind up being quasi-columnar. The same goes for other specialty areas. Systems like Vertica's have nothing to offer directly to these applications. However, it might be possible for Vertica to integrate with them fairly quickly, given that they're starting from vaguely similar philosophical roots.
There also are some technical details in that article; a link to a short, somewhat hagiographic intro to Mike himself; and so on.
Re:Omg top 5 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No scoop. PR being sneaked by Vertica! (Score:2)