Database Technology Trends

There are 2 major database vendors working on their next big version of their database engines. Microsoft and Oracle are getting ready to release their best database system yet. Well, in the near future at least. Nevertheless here are some preliminary infos that leaked from the development teams.

Microsoft SQL Server 2010

Just last year in August we were introduced to SQL Server 2008, which finally brought us backup compression and data compression amongst many other new features. Many SQL Server customers are still recovering from the SQL Server 2005 migration and find it difficult to keep up with this breath taking speed of new releases.

So what’s new in SQL Server 2010?

It will build on the data warehouse improvement of SQL Server 2008 and adds even more support for multi terabyte databases.

The main focus of SQL Server 2010 will be on “managed self services”. Self tuning will be achieved by interpreting the Dynamic Management Views (DMV). Is this the death of the DBA? Not at all, it will redefine the skills and duties of a DBA in the day to day operations. But then again, let’s see if and how this works.

Emphasis on policies is another big change. Many policies are already available since SQL Server 2005, but in SQL Server 2010 they will be enforced by default.

The last improvement is focused on better email integration and integration into the Web 2.0 environment. Imagine; SQL Server goes Twitter.

After all, these are preliminary information available through some rumor mills and a little bit from the Microsoft website. One thing is for sure, with the release of SharePoint 2010 (beta available now), SQL Server 2010 will become even more important.

I’m pretty sure that there will be more information available soon.

Oracle 12g

Yes, you heard right. Oracle 12g is around the corner. There is not much information available on this new release. The only detail that leaked so far is that Oracle 12g won’t support raw filesystems anymore. This is bad news for RAC environments. The OCR and the voting disk relay on raw filesystems via CFS like OCFS.

The word is that ASM will step in and close the gap in 12g. Also, more emphasis on NFS will be placed as well.

Other than that, there’s not much information regarding functionality enhancements available. As soon as I get more details I will post it.

Sybase is not in the radar to release yet another major release in the near future. The focus is on synchronizing the ASE 15.0.3 release with the Sybase ASE CE (Cluster Edition) version. There is also a new project that will replace Sybase Central with a web based management tool. The ASE (standard and cluster edition) is already available.

Sybase just released a couple of major new releases in their product line, Sybase IQ 15, Sybase Replication Server 15 and Sybase ASE Cluster Edition mid last year. There are new major releases in planning, but not released in the near future like Microsoft and Oracle. That’s at least to my knowledge. One thing is remarkable with Sybase; they had the best quarter in Q1 of 2009 and I can’t wait to get the results for Q2.

One thing is always interesting to observe. This constant competition and the need to outperform drive these vendors to constantly push the envelope and we as the consumer will get better, faster and cheaper products.

The downside is that we have to constantly upgrade our systems. Over time this creates enormous strains on IT staff and budgeting. It seems that the pace of new major database releases has picked up noticable and it remains up to the IT managers to make the right call at the right time. The current cutting in staff and budgets is no help either.

Database vendors are packing more and more value added features into their systems to gain more customers and sell their product. Hopefully we will see a speedy recovery of the economy to enable these companies to bring back staff and put all these great features to work soon.

Thanks,

Peter Dobler

Back in the 90′s a group of German engineers put together the world’s first grid computing network with over 100 PCs running on the first version of the Linux operating system. It was a great success and everybody called it the dawn of a new technology that will change the computing world forever.

What these engineers didn’t understand was how database engines worked at the time and how they actually set the trends for hardware development. The database engines were calling for Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) systems that offered dozens of CPUs in one single server platform. Just when we thought the mainframe was dead – with grid computing, we witnessed the birth of the open systems mainframe.
To offset these MPP systems, software architects created a middleware layer to get away from these monsters. Now we have these MPP systems in the center of the universe and all these middleware servers dancing around them.

For years to come, companies filled their data centers with hundreds of middleware servers and dozens of MPP systems. Cooling and power supplies were running at their peak and data center managers didn’t know how to support this hardware excess into the future.

This became the birthplace of server virtualization. Within a few years, server virtualization became the main focus for every company searching for infrastructure savings. Consolidating middleware servers was an easy task and a huge success story shared with pride by the project managers.

But one area was not so successful in consolidating hardware. MPP systems didn’t go away quietly. It turned out that the database systems were too much to handle for the server virtualization frenzy. Yes, countless efforts have been undertaken to move the databases off these monsters, but the virtual world couldn’t provide the performance needed to support the databases.

Remember our grid computing story? The vision of sharing an army of small computers to produce the same computing power as the massive MPP systems seemed lost forever. Until the ugly truth about MPP systems became obvious. Running huge MPP systems are not only energy intensive, but the associated maintenance costs are also burdensome. Buying a replacement MPP system was the only option. However, spending money got increasingly tight over the past several years. This all became a Catch-22.  You needed to spend more to increase your costs!

Database vendors to the rescue: grid database technology seems to be the way out of under the massive weight of these MPP systems. Take a couple of low-cost powerful dual or quad core servers and spread the workload over multiple servers. Not only do you get instant high availability, but you gain added scalability beyond your MPP platform’s physical limitations. There are two major methodologies in achieving grid databases; shared everything and shared nothing.

The shared everything category is dominated by Oracle and Sybase. Both systems are able to instantly failover database processes should one participating server go down, aka. high availability. And both can dynamically scale their CPU power by adding more servers to the grid, and both systems can balance the workload among all participating servers. Oracle RAC and Sybase ASE-Cluster Edition are the most sophisticated systems available today. If you want to squeeze the maximum out of your existing hardware or if you are seeking to replace energy-wasting and maintenance-fee-eating MPP monsters, these two databases are the weapons of choice.

The second methodology is shared nothing. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Federation Data Store represents the leader in this category. Unlike the shared everything technology, the shared nothing approach has a clear distinction between local and global data. The data federation approach allows combining data stored locally on multiple individual databases. It acts as an aggregator of multiple databases. This is not as sophisticated as the shared everything approach, but it gets the job done as well.

There’s a third contender, Sybase IQ Multiplex. This system uses a hybrid approach, shared data, but no shared cache. This is very unique and no other database vendor has anything like it. Sybase IQ is Sybase’s data warehouse engine. A column-vector database that set new performance benchmark records by having just one distinctive writer node in the cluster and a nearly unlimited number of reader nodes.  But there’s a caution: Never try to run an OLTP application on this system. This system is built for data warehousing and massive analytical reporting, a perfect match for data hungry BI tools.

There are a couple of other database vendors that are offering grid database technology of some flavor. This article is not meant to create a competitive analysis between all of these systems, but a starting point to get your imagination going. The bottom-line is that preserving energy becomes more and more important and software vendors are providing solutions to maximize low-cost and low-energy consuming hardware. The future belongs to grid databases.

My name is Peter Dobler and I’m a database expert for over 20 years.

This blog is designed to provide information about database technology trends and more importantly database implementation best practices.

My area of expertise are Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, Sybase Replication Server, Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g and 11g and SQL Server 2000,2005.