Monday, December 12, 2005

Which one of these DB's does not belong? Interesting survey of the open source db landscape. Genezzo is a pure perl database with ambitions to clustered scale-out (like clustra, backplane, oracle rac) via inexpensive ATA-over-Ethernet. I've been following it's pre-alpha progress via CPAN changelog. Although the goals are certainly admirable, it doesn't really seem to belong next to the mature and somewhat established alternatives, but maybe the Inquirer author knows something I don't? One other thought on the db roundup story: this market is crowded. There are many excellent choices, and when you add in the BI pieces that Pentaho brings to the table you've got a pretty comprehensive replacement for a commercial stack. I would hate to be Ingres, just getting started in a environment like this. The commercial db's give-away pricing means that any pilot you do with an open source alternative will cost you more in training/support than sticking with their Express Editions. Selling into that space seems like a Steve Jobs-class challenge. [Via planetpostresql's Robert Treat] 9:43:09 AM      comment []  trackback []

MySQL Oracle MySQL runs adwords Great post about how adwords was running on MySQL, dallied with Oracle, and is now running on MySQL. There's a bit in the comments about MySQL's lack of transactions -- I've never really considered that a crucial MySQL weakness, because I've done lots of decision support (reporting+lightweight oltp) applications without transactions. Adwords falls into that category, because it's really a semi-realtime clickstream data warehousing app. You could roll up the (nontransactional) web server logs with an ETL tool and perform the aggregation in a (nontransactional) database. I would have no issues with recommending MySQL for that. So much of the web (world?) is built on WORM ( write once, read many times ), and though MySQL is not my favorite DB, it works great for that. [Via Talli] 9:27:21 AM      comment []  trackback []