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DB Superstar Jim Starkley touts NuoDBs new patent

16 points by suprgeek 14y ago

Sambdala 14y ago
"Now it also has a patent that gives credence to its claims that its elastic database is truly innovative." Regardless of any innovation NuoDB may bring, can this phrase really be credibly stated, given everything we've seen in the patent arena? Edit: and the article ends with this paragraph: "We all know technology patents are tricky business — see GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts’ continuing coverage of the raging patent troll epidemic — but it does show that NuoDB may really be onto something here with its self-scaling elastic database." However, no technical details are given as to what the innovations are, just that the underpinning technology is so innovative that there weren't even names for what they're doing.
hendzen 14y ago
This article is terrible. Not only does it fail to give any technical information about the actual innovation being claimed, but it is also factually incorrect as it lists the wrong date for the patent filing. Here is the actual patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US20110231447 http://www.google.com/patents/US20110231447 I'll write a longer reply when I have time to digest the legalese. That said, Jim Starkley seems to be pretty patent-happy. Check out this one from 2008, "Method and apparatus for generating web pages from templates" [1]. [1] - http://www.google.com/patents/US7039658 http://www.google.com/patents/US7039658.
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  I waded through the patent (morning coffee reading). After all of that, I am unable to discern the novelty, having designed and implemented quite a few distributed database systems. The patent describes boringly standard internals that can be found in many existing distributed databases. In fact, I stood up a system on an EC2 cluster a couple years ago that had remarkably similar internals to what is described in the patent. Maybe I am missing something but I am skeptical. The design described in the patent still has the same problems and limitations that have plagued distributed OLTP systems for years. The patent appears to be a minor rearrangement of standard architectural elements common to a lot of distributed systems. What is described will work but I could buy equivalent functionality from other vendors. I was hoping for an interesting computer science-y technology but that patent doesn't contain one. It appears to be a description of a particular implementation of a conventional distributed transaction processing system. What am I missing?
MattRogish 14y ago
" NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, which he finds to be an oversimplification. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris said. He prefers to compare NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up tasks to any number of processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data organized, accessible and safe." I've been waiting for something like this. NoSQL products took a look at the limitations of SQL DBMS products and (incorrectly) assumed that SQL was the problem. SQL may be a symptom of the problem, but the deeper problem is conflating the logical and physical data model in SQL-based DBMS and also in most NoSQL products. A "record" (however you define it) doesn't need to be mapped 1-to-1 with the physical bits on storage, but for some reason (probably because it's easier) virtually every product does so. It doesn't matter what language you use to access your data, as long as the underlying DBMS operates on solid fundamental principles of data management (ACID, logical/physical orthogonality), you can have an innovative, pleasing-to-use system. Very interested to see what these folks come up with.
- Dave_Rosenthal 14y ago
  Well put. I'm the co-founder of a database startup called FoundationDB. One of our central philosophies is to decouple the logical data models our product supports from the physical one. In our case, we choose a core data model of an ordered, transactional key-value store, and built layers (http://foundationdb.com/#layers http://foundationdb.com/#layers) from there to expose other data models. However, decoupling the problem this way without true ACID transctions is very difficult. I think this is why there are so many NoSQL databases in the market with so many different data models; without transactions a change to a logical "record" cannot atomically update multiple physical "records" atomically.
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  Underneath the hood all database systems contain the same basic elements: an implementation of relational algebra operators and a concurrency control mechanism. Even nominally "non-relational" databases, like graph databases, are built on top of relational operator implementations (you say "graph traversal" and I say "join recursion"). What has traditionally separated the NoSQL databases from the SQL databases is that they implement a smaller subset of relational algebra e.g. the famous lack of join operators. This gave them the latitude to throw out the SQL interface and build interfaces that were more domain specific and a better match for what some applications need to do. Now we are starting to see new databases that are discarding the SQL orthodoxy but with a relational algebra implementation that is as expressive as anything found underneath a conventional SQL database. They could implement SQL if they wanted to but there is less of a compulsion to do so than there used to be. Hopefully this will lead to the best of both worlds.
efnx 14y ago
I read the quoted patent blurb and thought, "oh great, so now if I write 'A multi-user, elastic, on-demand, distributed relational database management system,' I have to deal with this dude suing me." I hope patents don't work like that...
- alexro 14y ago
  Use this to be safe: "a multi-user, on-demand, sharded relational database"
wmf 14y ago
This is some pretty tone-deaf PR considering all the patent lawsuits that are going on right now. If their database is as great as they say then this patent won't make or break them.

16 points by suprgeek 14y ago

"Now it also has a patent that gives credence to its claims that its elastic database is truly innovative." Regardless of any innovation NuoDB may bring, can this phrase really be credibly stated, given everything we've seen in the patent arena? Edit: and the article ends with this paragraph: "We all know technology patents are tricky business — see GigaOM’s Jeff John Roberts’ continuing coverage of the raging patent troll epidemic — but it does show that NuoDB may really be onto something here with its self-scaling elastic database." However, no technical details are given as to what the innovations are, just that the underpinning technology is so innovative that there weren't even names for what they're doing.

hendzen 14y ago

This article is terrible. Not only does it fail to give any technical information about the actual innovation being claimed, but it is also factually incorrect as it lists the wrong date for the patent filing. Here is the actual patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US20110231447 http://www.google.com/patents/US20110231447 I'll write a longer reply when I have time to digest the legalese. That said, Jim Starkley seems to be pretty patent-happy. Check out this one from 2008, "Method and apparatus for generating web pages from templates" [1]. [1] - http://www.google.com/patents/US7039658 http://www.google.com/patents/US7039658.

jandrewrogers 14y ago
I waded through the patent (morning coffee reading). After all of that, I am unable to discern the novelty, having designed and implemented quite a few distributed database systems. The patent describes boringly standard internals that can be found in many existing distributed databases. In fact, I stood up a system on an EC2 cluster a couple years ago that had remarkably similar internals to what is described in the patent. Maybe I am missing something but I am skeptical. The design described in the patent still has the same problems and limitations that have plagued distributed OLTP systems for years. The patent appears to be a minor rearrangement of standard architectural elements common to a lot of distributed systems. What is described will work but I could buy equivalent functionality from other vendors. I was hoping for an interesting computer science-y technology but that patent doesn't contain one. It appears to be a description of a particular implementation of a conventional distributed transaction processing system. What am I missing?

MattRogish 14y ago

" NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, which he finds to be an oversimplification. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris said. He prefers to compare NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up tasks to any number of processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data organized, accessible and safe." I've been waiting for something like this. NoSQL products took a look at the limitations of SQL DBMS products and (incorrectly) assumed that SQL was the problem. SQL may be a symptom of the problem, but the deeper problem is conflating the logical and physical data model in SQL-based DBMS and also in most NoSQL products. A "record" (however you define it) doesn't need to be mapped 1-to-1 with the physical bits on storage, but for some reason (probably because it's easier) virtually every product does so. It doesn't matter what language you use to access your data, as long as the underlying DBMS operates on solid fundamental principles of data management (ACID, logical/physical orthogonality), you can have an innovative, pleasing-to-use system. Very interested to see what these folks come up with.

Dave_Rosenthal 14y ago
Well put. I'm the co-founder of a database startup called FoundationDB. One of our central philosophies is to decouple the logical data models our product supports from the physical one. In our case, we choose a core data model of an ordered, transactional key-value store, and built layers (http://foundationdb.com/#layers http://foundationdb.com/#layers) from there to expose other data models. However, decoupling the problem this way without true ACID transctions is very difficult. I think this is why there are so many NoSQL databases in the market with so many different data models; without transactions a change to a logical "record" cannot atomically update multiple physical "records" atomically.
jandrewrogers 14y ago
Underneath the hood all database systems contain the same basic elements: an implementation of relational algebra operators and a concurrency control mechanism. Even nominally "non-relational" databases, like graph databases, are built on top of relational operator implementations (you say "graph traversal" and I say "join recursion"). What has traditionally separated the NoSQL databases from the SQL databases is that they implement a smaller subset of relational algebra e.g. the famous lack of join operators. This gave them the latitude to throw out the SQL interface and build interfaces that were more domain specific and a better match for what some applications need to do. Now we are starting to see new databases that are discarding the SQL orthodoxy but with a relational algebra implementation that is as expressive as anything found underneath a conventional SQL database. They could implement SQL if they wanted to but there is less of a compulsion to do so than there used to be. Hopefully this will lead to the best of both worlds.

efnx 14y ago

I read the quoted patent blurb and thought, "oh great, so now if I write 'A multi-user, elastic, on-demand, distributed relational database management system,' I have to deal with this dude suing me." I hope patents don't work like that...

alexro 14y ago
Use this to be safe: "a multi-user, on-demand, sharded relational database"

wmf 14y ago

This is some pretty tone-deaf PR considering all the patent lawsuits that are going on right now. If their database is as great as they say then this patent won't make or break them.