Slides from Matt Aslett's presentation at Cassandra Europe 2012.

1. NoSQL, NewSQL, and Beyond
The answer to SPRAINed relational databases
Matthew Aslett
Research Manager, Data Management and Analytics 1
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

2. 451 Research
 Matthew Aslett
• Research manager, data management and analytics
• With The 451 Group since 2007
• www.twitter.com/maslett
Information Management Commercial Adoption of Open Source
 Operational databases (CAOS)
 Data warehousing  Open source projects
 Data caching  Adoption of open source software
 Event processing  Vendor strategies
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

3. The 451 Group
3
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

4. Relevant reports
 NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond
• Assessing the drivers behind the development and adoption
of NoSQL and NewSQL databases, as well as data
grid/caching technologies
• Released April 2011
• Role of open source in driving innovation
• sales@the451group.com
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

5. NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond
NoSQL NewSQL
 New breed of non-relational  New breed of relational
database products database products
 Rejection of fixed table  Retain SQL and ACID
schema and join operations  Designed to meet scalability
 Designed to meet scalability requirements of distributed
requirements of distributed architectures
architectures  Or improve performance so
 And/or schema-less data horizontal scalability is no
management requirements longer a necessity
… and Beyond
 In-memory data grid/cache products
 Potentialprimary platform for distributed data management
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

6. The NoSQL landscape
Key Value Store Graph
•Citrusleaf Document • InfiniteGraph
• HandlerSocket* •RavenDB • Neo4j
• Redis • Riak • MongoDB • DEX
• Voldemort •CouchBase • CouchDB •OrientDB
• Membrain • Mongo Labs • Cloudant •NuvolaBase
• Oracle NoSQL • Mongo HQ • Iris Couch
• Castle •DynamoDB
•RethinkDB • Redis-to-go
•LevelDB • SimpleDB
• Cassandra
• DataStax EE
•Acunu
• HBase • App Engine Datastore -as-a-Service
• Hypertable Big Tables
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

7. The NewSQL ecosystem
-as-a-Service
New databases
•Drizzle •NuoDB
• Xeround •Drizzle • VoltDB •SQLFire
• Tokutek • Akiban • JustOne DB • Translattice
• GenieDB • Clustrix
• Schooner SQL
•ScaleDB •ParElastic • ScaleBase
Storage engines • MySQL Cluster •Continuent •ScaleArc
•Zimory Scale •Galera • CodeFutures
Clustering/sharding
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

8. SPRAINED RELATIONAL DATABASES
Photo credit: Foxtongue on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxtongue/4844016087/
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

9. SPRAIN
Scalability - Hardware economics
 Example project/service/vendor:
• BigTable, HBase, Riak, MongoDB, Couchbase, Hadoop
• Xeround, NuoDB
• Data grid/cache
 Associated use case:
• Large-scale distributed data storage
• Analysis of continuously updated data
• Multi-tenant PaaS data layer
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

10. SPRAIN
Scalability
 Netflix:
• 37X growth in requests Jan 2010-Jan 2011
• “We had to get out of the datacenter business”
 Dachis Group:
• Specifically wanted a horizontally scalable data store
 Spotify:
• Importance (and challenges) of cross-datacenter replication
 Tellybug:
• Peak scalability – mission critical for two hours per week. Elastic
scalability still not solved.
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

11. SPRAIN
Performance – RDBMS limitations
 Example project/service/vendor:
• Hypertable, Couchbase, Riak, Membrain, MongoDB, Redis
• Data grid/cache
• VoltDB, Clustrix
 Associated use case:
• Real time data processing of mixed read/write workloads
• Data caching
• Large-scale data ingestion
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

12. SPRAIN
Performance
 Tellybug:
• Having won the contract to deliver app for Britain’s Got Talent
realised that its MySQL/Django/Python stack couldn’t deliver the
anticipated load
 Spotify:
• Major upgrades without service interruptions, not possible with
sharded SQL databases
 Rackspace:
• Ability to monitor a million different things, ability to withstand the
failure of 1/3 data centers
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

13. SPRAIN
Relaxed consistency - CAP Theorem
 Example project/service/vendor:
• Dynamo, Voldemort, Cassandra, Riak
• Amazon DynamoDB
 Associated use case:
• Multi-data center replication
• Service availability
• Non-transactional data off-load
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

14. SPRAIN
Relaxed consistency
 Netflix:
• “We value availability over consistency. We don’t need full
consistency.”
 Tellybug:
• Soft production data – the ability to ignore failures
• Spotify:
• Flexibility to combine different consistency levels for different
column families in a single application
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

15. SPRAIN
Agility - polyglot persistence, schema-less
 Example project/service/vendor:
• MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, Riak
• Google App Engine, SimpleDB,
 Associated use case:
• Mobile/remote device synchronization
• Agile development
• Data caching
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

16. SPRAIN
Agility
 Tellybug:
• Had 4-5 weeks to ship a production system to meet contract
• Ability to re-build entire infrastructure from scratch in 10-15 mins
 Netflix:
• Single SQL database had to be brought down to change the schema.
• Put the logic into the Web services and employ distributed key
stores to enable agile development and schema changes
 Spotify:
• Cassandra is a platform for quickly developing new applications
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

17. SPRAIN
Intricacy – volume, velocity, variety
 Example project/service/vendor:
• Neo4j, GraphDB, InfiniteGraph
• Apache Cassandra, Hadoop, Riak
• VoltDB, Clustrix
 Associated use case:
• Social networking applications
• Geo-locational applications
• Configuration management database
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

18. SPRAIN
Intricacy
 Dachis Group:
• Combining social media data for 2,000 brands with sentiment,
relationship, conversations, social graph
 Spotify:
• More than half a billion playlists, about 10 thousand requests per
second at peak
 Rackspace:
 One row per customer with thousands of columns – potentially
millions of columns
 Tellybug:
• Ability to cope with 10,000 interactions/sec and integrate that with
the social graph for thousands of concurrent users
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

19. SPRAIN
Necessity - open source
 The failure of existing suppliers to address emerging
requirements
 Example projects:
• BigTable: Google
• Dynamo: Amazon
• Cassandra: Facebook
• HBase: Powerset
• Voldemort: LinkedIn
• Hypertable: Zvents
• Neo4j: Windh Technologies
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

20. SPRAIN
Necessity
 Spotify:
• Created own backup and restore technology
 Rackspace:
• Distributed secondary indexing, blob storage, many other projects
 Tellybug:
• Created sharded counter in memcached, wrote several tools to
figure out closeness to the ‘truth’
 Netflix:
• Developed multiple tools including multi-datacenter replication,
automated configuration and backup, provisioning interface etc
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

21. Relevant reports
 MySQL, NoSQL and NewSQL
• Assessing the competitive dynamic between the MySQL
ecosystem, NoSQL and NewSQL technologies
• Due May 2012
• Including market sizing of the three
database segments
• Survey of 200+ database users
• sales@the451group.com
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved

22. Thank you. Questions? Comments?
matt.aslett@451research.com
@maslett
© 2012 by The 451 Group. All rights reserved