First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database 117
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.'"
Google Patents? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody know how broad Google's map/reduce patents are?
It's been said that the whole reason Oracle bought Sun was to clobber Google with the Java patents so they could cross-license the map/reduce patents and get back to an Oracle database that could scale.
Regardless, corporations should just release their software and fight it out in court later (sorry, real people, you can't play) but now that this is out, things might get more interesting in the patent wars.
Re:Oracle = pain (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that PHB's buy Oracle thinking because it's "top of the line" it will just be great out of the box. Instead, it requires skillful tuning and fiddling to use effectively, but the PHB's don't want to pay for that aspect.
It's almost like giving a Stradivarius violin to your neighbor's newbie kid and thinking that "because it's a Strad, it will make the kid sound good."
Opinion: Complete failure of Oracle security respo (Score:4, Interesting)
So Sayeth Litchfield:
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2005/Oct/56 [seclists.org]
'nuff said
Re:Oracle = pain (Score:5, Interesting)
In what world do you live? Oracle DB is the only great product they have, the rest is complete and utter crap, and they don't even know how to maintain them. We've been trying for months now to get someone from Oracle to explain us why our OSB does not work as it should, and even the guy from engineering that they shipped over half the world was just as clueless as we are.Siebel has been going downhill ever since they purchased it. BRM has never worked in a large deployment. Fusion is still just a dream that doesn't really work, the list goes on...
And you know what, it's because all the good engineers don't want to work at Oracle. Over the course of my current project, we've had three different consultants, the first two quit because they said the atmosphere is just awful and noone has a clue what's going on. And they are trying hard to hide that they have people leaving the company in droves, leaving people with very little experience maintaining software that they have no clue about.
Practically ACID (Score:5, Interesting)
The serious part of Oracle NoSQL is a practical approximation of ACID compliance, the standard that SQL databases like to offer.
If this claim holds up, then its easy to see where Oracle could come out ahead of other NoSQL databases. TFA mentions that this practical approximation is dealt with by arranging the cluster machines in two axes: the replication axis and the sharding axis. Along the sharding axis, each major key is guaranteed to be tied to a single machine. Since there is only one record to be updated, there is no "eventual consistency" problem. The replication axis is responsible for making multiple copies of that data. If full ACID compliance is desired, even along the replication axis, there are plenty of options for ensuring that the write is complete before calling the transaction complete: the master node is updated, a majority of replicated nodes are updated, or all replicated nodes are updated.
This approach seems to take the best of both worlds in the NoSQL arena: sharding, which is the approach used by MySQL cluster, and replication, as used by pretty much every other NoSQL store available. Of course, if you have a fuck-ton of data, you'll also need a fuck-ton of machines. This is not a server you will be testing without considerable resources at your disposal.
Re:Oracle = pain (Score:5, Interesting)
They are also about selling training course. The syntax for half of the commands is appalling. RMAN for example with its "copy control file from path1 to path2 whilst patting your head and then write home to your gran" attempt at plain english language is far too obtuse for what it actually does, which isn't much. It copies a control file and then does autobackup. Wow. Didn't need a paragraph of shakespeare.
It's the same throughout. Then they can't even install the software without running a massive java app (I really don't want to go into too much detail about how much time it took to automate Oracle installs...)
And before you ask - we're running the 6th busiest Oracle database in Europe - according to Oracle themselves - running across 4*128 SSD drive arrays at a cost of millions.. and for the 3 or 4 features we need to justify the licenses instead or designing our way out of the same problem, at times I really wonder about the hassle, especially when our data is so important and locked up into such a bloated closed up mess.