Monday, April 10, 2006

Xkoto : Free RDBMS clustered synergy Xkoto Chief Technology Officer Ariff Kassam explained that the Database Load Balancer works by way of having each node maintain an exact replica of the database. To do that, any write transactions have to be broadcast to all nodes. The technology performs load balancings on read transactions, spreading reads across the cluster to get the speed up. "That's how we get scale up—by parsing and distributing reads across the cluster," Kassam said. "We don't reach everybody with reads. We just send to" the node with the most capacity at a given time, he said. According to Lee, Xkoto's technology is achieving 85 percent scalability each time a low-end, commodity server is added to a cluster, as the company demonstrated in a benchmark performed at IBM's request. That compares to adding boxes to a cluster without a load balancer, wherein the database can't use the added box unless an enterprise is using software from a vendor, such as IBM's DPF (Data Partitioning Facility). The typical cluster setup involves two nodes with software that enables failover. Oracle has its Data Guard software, while Sybase has Replication Server, each of which enables two-node replication. One node serves up application requests, while the other node sits idle, waiting until failover occurs. But such passive waiting doesn't increase performance; it's only there in case of a disaster scenario. The differentiator with Xkoto's technology is its "active-active" status, Lee said. "Every node in the cluster is actively serving transactions all the time," he said. "It's not sitting there for the once in a blue moon when the primary node fails." The innovate thing here is that they're using the free version of DB2 as their DB layer, with other free (not Free) db's to follow. I'm sure it was not the big 3 DB companies' intent to give away the store when they offered their Express Editions ... but products like this are really going to accelerate the cannabilization. I can only imagine the express licenses will have a 'no-clustering' clause added in ... caveat emptor 9:54:26 AM      comment []  trackback []

Leading the Downloadable Datacenter Revolution: Ingres? The Infoworld article mentions that Ingres is planning on wrapping their rdbms in a linux vm, to sell as a soft appliance. That's music to my vm-loving ears, of course, but doesn't seem like much of a differentiator - Spikesource and even Oracle both have something similar on VMWare's site. I'm trying very hard to 'get' Ingres. They've only made noise about selling into enterprises to date, and they haven't articulated or embraced the concept of their community. I don't grasp how the "I'm cheaper than Oracle" pitch differs from the other 99.9% of the market that's cheaper than Oracle, and whether faux-open-source , where source is published but one company monopolizes the commit bits, works in databases (whereas it might work in the less crowded CRM/DocMgmt spaces). You need something else - EnterpriseDb has a story ... what's Ingres'? 9:50:06 AM      comment []  trackback []