Pythian Group

Pythian is very excited to return to the much-awaited RMOUG 12 held in Denver, Colorado from February 14-16, 2012. Keep your eyes open for Alex Gorbachev, Marc Fielding, Don Seiler and Gwen Shapira in attendance. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers this year featuring a total of seven papers presented by Alex, Marc, Don and Gwen. If you have any feedback on our sessions, please send your comments directly to the speaker or to Vanessa Simmons, Pythian Director of Marketing. Please also follow this link to sign up to receive notice of future speaking engagements, webinars or Pythian news.

Be sure to stop by our booth (#3,6,7,10) to say hello to our friends from the OakTable Network, and enter our draw to win the new Amazon Kindle with software provided by Cary Millsap (MR-Trace, MR-Tools & Method-R Profiler) and a pack of digital e-book downloads courtesy of Apress. Also slated is the RAC Attack workshop, which was first offered at Oracle Open World and UKOUG, and is now in its second year at RMOUG. Pythian is co-sponsoring this event with Apress and it’s a fun and informative way to learn from our experts how and when to properly build a RAC environment.

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With the announcement of the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle also comes up with some really cool technology stack which is being termed as Oracle Big Data Connectors (OBDC). This piece of software can be used with both Oracle Big Data Appliance and other Apache Hadoop-based systems.

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With all the buzz in OOW about the big data machine, there was also a lot of non-sense flying around. I love it that the Oracle community is finally interested in Hadoop and NoSQL, but I hate it when people sound authoritative without having an actual clue. I’ve left a few presentations with smoke coming out of my ears.

Here are few things that people got all wrong:
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Oracle announced the Big Data Appliance on Monday morning keynote. Many people, me included, were long waiting for this to happen. Others didn’t think it will ever happen. So naturally, there is a lot of buzz and excitement around the new device in Open World. The keynote announcement was very short on details and certainly did not satisfy my technical curiosity. So I went to a few presentations to hear what exactly is included in the offering.
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Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is being announced at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote as I’m posting this. It will take some time for it to be actually available for shipment and some details will likely change but here is what we have so far about Oracle Big Data Appliance.

A rack with InfiniBand, full of 2U servers similar to Exadata Storage. No flash storage needed so couple sockets and a dozen of disks will do. Maybe more ram than Exadata storage cells themselves. I suspect you could have as many servers as you want in a configuration but since Hadoop clusters are usually dozens and more nodes, full rack seems reasonable with about 20 Hadoop compute nodes to start with. Real deployments should easily go into multiple racks stacked together.

Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for fast data loading and later data processing with Hadoop so InfiniBand will be there — same Exadata/Exalogic-like platform.

Oracle should also have its own NoSQL engine — Oracle NoSQL Database. If you know existing Oracle products, Berkley DB seems to be a reasonable foundation to power Oracle’s new NoSQL engine.
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Many analysts are suggesting that a big data appliance will be announced at this OOW. Based on published Oracle OpenWorld focus sessions on oracle.com (PDF documents), the following technologies will most likely be the key — Hadoop, NoSQL, Hadoop data loader for Oracle, R Language.

Want more details — you have to wait for them. This page contained some details but they moved here.

As the birds have started their yearly migration back to their homes from the warmer areas to the relative less cooler areas in summer, bloggers are also touching base with the technologies which they cherish most and coming back with some master strokes. This new cool edition of Log Buffer, the coolest blog carnival covering hottest topics encompass that home coming. Now Chill with Log Buffer #222!!!

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Well day two here at PgEast has drawn to a close and it was another
very informative day.

Today I concentrated on the more common tasks of a Pg DBA so I attended three
talks (four if you count mine) that where rather heavy on the technical side of being a Pg DBA

Keven Kempter drew me back again with his excellent talk on Backup and recovery methods
this time giving some very good advice on how to use and abuse of pg_Dump_all and
PG_restore. He also touched on three different recipes PITR on ProstgreSQL and gave some handy
advice on when and why to use it.

I also caught another Mongo talk this time by Steve Francia it was on the application of Mongo
in a real world web retail store. He presented a very convincing argument for the NoSQL side of things in
the retail realm namely that RDBMS works great when you have but a few similar products
such as books, CDs and movies but what if you are a retailer who sells Jeans, Watches, Fresh fruit as well.

Mongo allows for a completely flexible schema and his fits the diverse retail model well.
Another good point he made is in the archiving pf transactions. Taking a product return
as an example one has to keep a recoded of all the details of the sale and you have to have some sort of mechanism to reconcile data points such as the price which might be stale they the time of the return. In
the Mongo world one just keeps the original sales record. A rather elegant solution.

I rounded out the day with two technical Pg talks the first by Magnus Hagander gave a very informative talk on the differing approaches to the ‘caching problem of web applications’ with PostgreSQL. By leveraging PostgreSQL notification system one can easily build a very robust and scalable cache with another open commercial product called Varnish.

I rounded out the day with an talk on Migrating from MySQL to PostgreQSL given by Paul Gross. This was an interesting case study of his experience where he was constrained by a 0 down time requirement. His solution was to use the ORM he was familiar with ‘ActiveRecord’ and use that to solve the many problems with data conversion he was encountering using just Ruby on its own. He used an iterative approach where he ran a script over and at each pass gathering up any changes in the originating MySQL into the PostgreSQL until they where exactly the same. This was successful with only a 30 second blackout time during the switchover to the new DB.

Well that is about it for day.

“Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store” is a high level description of a data store, written by Amazon to solve the problem of a system where updates must never ever fail and must take less than a specific amout of time in 99.99% of the cases. No matter what happens to the servers or the network, updates to the system must continue as usual, and they emphasize that they deal with hardware and network failures nearly constantly.

The paper has one of the best descriptions on the trade-offs involved in eventual consistency, and when it makes sense. But even more interesting is the implicit decision that disks, commits and synchronous writes to redo logs are not really needed for durability.

To allow for simple design, robustness and high performance, Amazon limited the reporting capabilities – data is accessed by primary key only. To implement the high availability requirement, Dynamo replicates each key-value pair between multiple machines in different data stores. And to make sure that replication doesn’t impact performance, Amazon decided they can live without consistency – requests from the system can sometimes return old data or several contradicting versions of data – for Amazon’s requirements, this is much better than failure or delays.
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OpenSQLCamp is less than 4 months away, and I have finally gotten around to updating the site. Special thanks go to Bradley Kuzsmaul and the folks at Tokutek for getting the ball rolling and making the reservation at MIT. Using MIT means that we will have *free* reliable wireless guest access and projects.

OpenSQL Camp is a free unconference for people interested in open source databases (MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, Drizzle), including non-relational databases, database alternatives like NoSQL stores, and database tools such as Gearman. We are not focusing on any one project, and hope to see representatives from a variety of open source database projects attend. As usual I am one of the main organizers of Open SQL Camp (in previous years, Baron Schwartz, Selena Deckelmann and Eric Day have been main organizers too; this year Bradley Kuzsmaul is the other main organizer). The target audience are users and developers, but others are encouraged to attend too. There will be both presentations and hackathons, with plenty of opportunities to learn, contribute, and collaborate!

I have updated the main Boston 2010 page at http://opensqlcamp.org/Events/Boston2010/ with travel and logistics information, including links to:
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