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Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a tho

Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable) alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.

ramanujan 14y ago
Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really. If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload. And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company. [0] http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
- mbesto 14y ago
  MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1] [1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applications/sap-well-be-no-2-database-player-by-2015/232300472 http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...
Toshio 14y ago
Somehow - sql server and - reliable don't really belong in the same sentence.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.
  - Toshio 14y ago
    I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there. If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.
    - kogir 14y ago
      Having actually deployed and used SQL Server extensively, I know how it handles "multi-version read consistency": As I tell it to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx In addition to setting a database level default, you can even have it behave differently per connection. Snapshot isolation will never lock, period. SQL Server is actually quite capable, and has the fantastic tooling that cheaper alternatives like PostgreSQL lack.
      - Toshio 14y ago
        Care to say how big your database is, and what your workload looks like (reads vs. writes)?
  - EwanToo 14y ago

ramanujan 14y ago

Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.

masklinn 14y ago
> Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really. If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload. And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company. [0] http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
mbesto 14y ago
MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1] [1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applications/sap-well-be-no-2-database-player-by-2015/232300472 http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...

Toshio 14y ago

Somehow - sql server and - reliable don't really belong in the same sentence.

ghshephard 14y ago
Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.
- Toshio 14y ago
  I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there. If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.
  - kogir 14y ago
    Having actually deployed and used SQL Server extensively, I know how it handles "multi-version read consistency": As I tell it to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx In addition to setting a database level default, you can even have it behave differently per connection. Snapshot isolation will never lock, period. SQL Server is actually quite capable, and has the fantastic tooling that cheaper alternatives like PostgreSQL lack.
    - Toshio 14y ago
      Care to say how big your database is, and what your workload looks like (reads vs. writes)?
- EwanToo 14y ago