Database Technology Trends

Keeping up with the news from so many different sources is getting harder and harder these days. That’s why I try to offer a one-stop-shop for your major database vendor news. You get the scoop and if you want to dig deeper, the links are right there. Let’s get started.

Sybase

I am not anticipating any new Sybase ASE version before this summer. None are announced. This is due to the massive efforts of certifying SAP R/3 on Sybase ASE, which is expected by the end of Q2. There were many joined events between SAP and Sybase since Sybase’s acquisition by SAP. The most notable is SAP TechED. The latest was in Berlin and drew a lot of interest, especially into Sybase mobility as well as Sybase IQ and ASE.

This year Sybase TechWave 2011 will be hosted within the SAP TechED USA in Las Vegas. This is the much needed boost for Sybase to a larger audience.

Sybase IQ 15.3 is expected to be released soon. The beta tests are going for quite a while. The highlight for Sybase IQ 15.3 is the PlexQ Distributed Query Platform, a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that accelerates highly complex queries by distributing work to many computers in a grid configuration.

Sybase IQ 15.3 PlexQ Distributed Query Platform solution offers the following benefits:

• Extreme performance: enables users to harness the power of multiple compute resources in a Sybase IQ PlexQ environment to simultaneously execute queries across the grid. This is the next step after Sybase IQ 15 introduced multiple writers in the multiplex grid.
• Increased scalability: empowers system managers to easily and cost effectively scale out Sybase IQ PlexQ nodes with commodity hardware and managing SLAs in a high demand environment.
• Architectural flexibility: allows system managers to quickly and easily group subsets of compute resources as logical entities. This allows DBA to effectively utilize workload balancing and resource sharing.

2011 will be a very interesting year for Sybase and as I stated many times before, SAP made all the difference. Sybase is on its way back to gaining market shares as well as market interest.

Click here to read more about Sybase IQ.

Oracle

No, Oracle 12g is not here, yet. There is little or no information available on this topic. The only leaked information so far is that raw devices will no longer be supported. Well, you saw this coming, right? With the maturity of ASM you will probably skip raw devices even sooner.

Let’s focus on the latest release 11g R2. Many of the new features are focused on the cluster.

Single-Instance RAC: This will replace the custom DBSTART scripting DBAs had to do to automatically start all the Oracle instances upon system start. This will implement the restart features every node in a cluster is accustom to.

Cluster Time Synchronization Service: Synchronizing system times across all RAC nodes can be a chore. If you’ve ever experienced a node eviction within a Real Application Cluster database’s cluster configuration, you know how difficult it can be to tie together the train of events that caused the eviction.

ASM: Many new features that offers better support for clusterware.

ACFS: The ASM Clustered File System is the successor of the OCFS and the OCFS2. This allows for better management of the voting disk in a RAC configuration.

Improvements to software installation and patching: The previously standalone Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) is now integrated into the Oracle Universal Installer. Plus there is a new zero-downtime patching for clusterware.

There are several performance improvement features in 11g R2, especially for data warehouse environments.

These include:

• Instance “Caging”
• Automatic Degree of Parallelism
• Parallel Data Cache: In-Memory Execution.
• Faster Refreshes of Materialized Views

Data Guard: New disaster recovery options and better standby database management.

All these improvements and new features are part of the paradigm shift of Oracle that moves the database management closer toward a self-tuning, self-managed and self-healing database system.

Click here to read more about Oracle 11g R2

SQL Server

After 2 releases of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft is releasing the new SQL Server 2011, code name Denali. At a first glance this is a developer’s release. Many new features are geared to better support SQL developers and a better integration into Visual Studio is also a key improvement.

Here are some of the new features:

Multi-Subnet Failover Clustering: This feature allows to geographically separate cluster nodes to provide disaster recovery and high availability. This feature depends on Windows Server failover cluster.

Sequences: Oracle style sequences for unique key value generation. Finally!

Query Paging: This is a feature that MySQL offers for years and now SQL Server is offering as well. Paging through result sets has some distinct performance advantages and simplifies coding efforts for developers.

The most significant change is the drop of DTS package support. This is not actually an announced feature, but an observation within SQL Server Management Studio. The Data Transformation Services menu option under the Legacy section has been removed. I think it is time for the hold outs to convert their old DTS packages to SSIS.

A little side note, SQL Server Management Studio now offers support for multi-screen environments.

Click here to download a trial of SQL Server 2011

Conclusion

Here you have it, a potpourri of new database technologies across vendors and systems. I hope you found something of interest to you and as always, please leave feedback.

Until next time,

Peter Dobler

First of all I have to apologize to my loyal readers for the long absence from my blog. In simple terms, “I got busy”. But in these economic times, I guess this is a good thing. I don’t want to give a promise I can’t keep, but I will do my best to keep this blog up-to-date.

The past few years were dominated by all major database vendors introducing and improving their database cluster products. There is the bread of shared nothing clusters like Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and there are the share everything clusters like Oracle and Sybase. You can read all about this in my previous post “Grid Databases – The Future of Database Technology?“.

It is amazing how far these technologies have come and how much we got used to “always available” databases. You know what’s coming next. Now, that we have uninterrupted access to data, it would be great if we get the data faster. Well, the database vendors have an answer for that as well.

It was about 7 years ago when I first was introduced into the concept of in-memory databases. At the time it was less known database vendor called Times-Ten that offered an in-memory database with blazing performance metrics, hence times ten. It was the perfect answer to solid state disk drives that could drain an IT budget in a hurry.

Apparently this technology was so intriguing that Oracle decided to buy Times Ten and make it Oracle’s in-memory database. The only downside to this is, it is not an Oracle database in memory, it is Times Ten’s engine running in memory. This creates admin nightmares to have special skills to manage the Times Ten engine in addition to the Oracle server, as well as different software development techniques for both systems. Performance gains out weight manageability concerns, I guess?

Just recently Sybase announced its Sybase ASE server, in version 15.5, will have an in-memory engine equivalent that will provide the same functionality and manageability as the standard Sybase ASE server. This is a remarkable step, because it provides performance gains transparent to client applications and the database engine will not challenge DBAs to learn new skills. To me this is a win-win situation.

Microsoft is still in the planning and rumor phase of providing an in-memory database for its next version of SQL Server. The code name for the next SQL Server upgrade is Kilimanjaro. This is the name to use when searching for upgrade information. It is not clear when the new SQL Server release will be available and it is not clear if it will be named SQL Server 2010. It depends if it gets out this year or not.

IBM has its own in-memory database for DB2 and I believe it is a Java based and Java supporting engine. I have to admit that I’m not as fluent with DB2 as I wish to and please add your comments to this post if you’re a DB2 expert.

Having listed all the in-memory contenders, the question pops up “What about Sybase IQ?” or any other data warehouse database for that matter, Terradata and Netezza for example.

The answer lies in the architecture of in-memory databases. They are designed to improve transaction processing volume, the classic OLTP applications. Data warehouses would not have any benefits from in-memory databases. In-memory databases provide extreme high-speed transaction processing without the need to confirm disk write success. Traditional databases have one thing they have to do to ensure data integrity. They all need to wait for the disk i/o to confirm a write to disk. Database vendors came up with very complex and sophisticated caching techniques to overcome this performance challenge. But they cannot ignore this fundamental requirement.

In-memory database bypass this disk writing requirement and that’s what improves the speed. Designed for high volume transaction systems, like e-commerce shopping carts, in-memory databases are unbeatable when it comes to writing transaction data. And this is fundamentally different to data caching of traditional database engines. Data caching improves read performance, but does nothing to improve write performance.
There is a downside to these databases as well; they offer alternatives to performance problems in poorly written applications. Like powerful hardware, in-memory database have the potential to mask poor application development. We might see an explosion of in-memory database implementations due to this matter.

Bottom-line: this is cutting edge technology that will give database architects another tool in the toolbox to design the most effective database environment. Do yourself a favor and try to get your hands at a test environment to experience this technology first hand. Yes, 2010 could be the year of in-memory databases.

Thanks for listening,
Peter

It was summer of 2000 when I first learned about Sybase IQ and its revolutionary column vector database technology. As a long time Sybase ASE and Oracle DBA I was used to database engines that organize data in a row by row method. For quite some time I had difficulties to think in column terms and not in row terms.

A column vector database requires totally different methodology for performance and tuning efforts. Nothing is straight forward and the message that more data volume doesn’t make a difference in the query performance is not easy to understand. For example: A traditional database engine allows the usage of only one index per table in the same query. Sybase IQ has no limits. If each column in the query requires a different index, it will use a different index. In fact, by default every column is an index.

Getting my hands around the fact of having queries perform up to a 1000 times faster on Sybase IQ than on traditional row based RDBMS systems is no easy matter either. Of course in an Oracle implementation with the OLAP technology similar results can be achieved. However, you are paying for the underlying OLTP engine regardless if you’re using it or not. Sybase IQ doesn’t have this overhead.

One of the key features of Sybase IQ is its data compression. I worked with Sybase IQ systems that easily exceeded 80% compression ratio. Meanwhile, every database vendor introduced data compression into their database engines, but Sybase IQ is the undisputed leader in the highest compression ratio of them all.

This post is not meant to explain how Sybase IQ works and why it is so superior in analytical query processing compared to its row processing based counter parts. Please click here to read more about Sybase IQ’s amazing technology.

I know that there are other data warehouse systems out there that are equally as fast as Sybase IQ and some are even faster, but in this article I am focused on the Sybase IQ engine and its recent setting of a new benchmark record for TPC-H transactions. This record is all about saving money while providing blazing fast performance. Please click here to read the detail report on this milestone.

OK, back to what’s new in version 15 of Sybase IQ.

There are two major improvements in the new release that are worth mentioning.

1. The overall query performance was once again dramatically improved and yields in an average 20%-50% performance gain, compared to the previous Sybase IQ release.

What does this mean for your business?

Analytical queries are typically CPU hungry monsters that can eat up your entire processing resources. Producing results faster means more queries will be processed in the same time window.

It also means the hardware upgrade can be postponed for a while. Considering that the associated QA requirements to move an entire production system to a new hardware platform can be a very expensive proposition and combined with the cost of the new hardware maybe not worth the investment. In comparison; a standalone upgrade of the database engine might be worth the effort.

It further means that cheaper server hardware on Linux can be used to build Sybase IQ multiplex systems that produce high end performance results on a slim budget. Due to Sybase IQ’s architecture there are no added network constraints either. 

2. Multiple writer nodes in a single multiplex environment.

This is an enormous step forward. Previously a typical Sybase IQ was build with one big server that acts as the writer node and many smaller servers for the reader nodes. The thinking was to provide the best hardware to the CPU intensive load jobs to minimize the load windows. The downside of this architecture was that in a failure situation, one of the smaller servers would take over the writer part and then would be helplessly overwhelmed in case the writer node couldn’t be fixed in time for the next load.

It is also economically not practical to devote high-end, expensive server hardware to a job that only last for a fraction of a daily work load. Having multiple writer nodes solves this problem once and for all.
Utilizing all the available processing power in a multiplex environment ultimately leads to faster load performance, which can be solved without upgrading the writer node server hardware over and over again.

Also, another data load performance improvement is the new feature of loading data directly from clients. This means that data can be loaded from files using a simple SQL statement instead of copying data files onto a server and then using the bcp command.

Of course there are other major improvements in security, flexibility and integration support, but the two improvements above are the major contributors to any cost savings or cost avoidance initiative a business is taking on these days.

Sybase also improved their client apps to better manage Sybase IQ, easier develop applications for Sybase IQ and more effectively monitor Sybase IQ. Once the Achilles heel of Sybase, these tools are now very usable and mature.

From a cost/performance point of view, Sybase IQ is a force to be reckoned with and due to its column vector architecture there is no other major database engine in the market like it. To support Sybase’s strong performance in technology they also had their best financial year ever in 2008 and the best quarter on record in Q1 2009.

I hope you enjoyed my brief introduction into Sybase’s data warehouse engine Sybase IQ and its latest version 15 features.

Take care,
Peter