First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'"

Re:Oracle = pain

[CmdrPony]

No, Oracle databases are about performance and features that other database solutions don't offer. They have always been. "There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects." not only holds true for this Oracle product, it's true for all their products. Yes, they cost a lot, but also offer things anyone else don't. Your website project will probably be ok with MySQL, but enterprises have different needs.

Re:Berkeley DB

[Dr_Barnowl]

BDB is an in-process key-value store. It's limited to being accessed by a single process, and has much more limited replication ability.

This is a server based product ; your client communicates with servers using a driver. It's "eventually consistent", meaning that changes take time to propagate across the replication axis, so not all clients see the same picture (although with this one, you can influence the ACID-ity of atoms of data by grouping them on "major" keys).

The advantage is mostly scalability. You can throw more servers at it to provide more capacity, and the software will do a lot of the work to ensure that this works. If you want more capacity on BDB, you need to throw a bigger chunk of iron at it.

The other major difference ; the open-source license (Sleepycat [wikipedia.org]) for BerkeleyDB is copyleft. Despite the name, it's not released under a Berkely Software Distribution style license - Oracle dual license it and you have to pay a commercial license fee to distribute products based on it without releasing your own sources.

The Community Editor license file for Oracle NoSQL from the distribution lists a number of licenses, all of them BSD-style - new BSD and Apache 2.0 ; in certain quarters this will be greeted with a great deal more enthusiasm. The only difference between the Community and paid editions is the support.

Re:Oracle = pain

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm not sure where you get that idea from about dbas and devs not being required to communicate... That's way off...

What kind of world do you think you're living in?

Re:Oracle = pain

[durdur]

Oracle is not "plug and play" for developers, far from it. But it is true that recent versions do a lot of auto-tuning, and you can get reasonable performance with not a lot of work (but that assumes you don't have a truly dumb design, and really high performance requires a DBA, for sure). Oracle's superior locking model also in my experience produces less developer pain that many of the alternatives.