Paulo Gaspar wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> That IBM product looks very similar to Oracle's (previously
> Tangosol's) Coherence.
>
> Being a Java man, I am sure Mr. Jenks must have eared about it,
> especially because Cameron Purdy (Tangosol founder) is widely known
> and respected by the Java Open Source community.
>
>
> Since the beginning of this thread (yes, Paul and Jim, keep it coming)
> Coherence keeps popping in my mind and I already created a "New mail
> message" a few times to post something about it... just to quit before
> making sure of some details about it (ACID) which could invalidate it.
>
> Now that I did my home work and that Mr. Jenks went the Object Grid
> way, I must say that Coherence's success is the market's proof that a
> decent implementation Jim's idea would be very well received.
>
> Actually:
> - Jim, are you trying to build something Oracle would by? I mean,
> after being bought by MySql, what's next?
> =;o)
>

You know, Oracle didn't quite make my short list of companies that I
really like. I got to spend a fair bit of time with Ken Jacobs at
MySQL User Conferences (he is either Heikki's daemon or minder). Nice,
decent guy. Ellison, well, I don't think so.

But I'm not worrying about that at the moment. I'm building
technology. We'll see where it takes me. I've got a nice 19" rack, 5
quad-core 1U servers, a KVM, and a gigabit switch. What else could a
geek want?

> Just talking about Social Sites was a bad disguise: Social Sites can
> mostly live without a database. Memcache, some persistent hash tables
> and a text search system like Solr are enough for most of its needs.
>

That's true. They're the one segment of the Web 2.0 world that doesn't
care about ACID. Funny, though, they're also the one segment of the Web
2.0 world that uses MySQL. Hmmm....

>
> One of my friends works for Oracle. Whenever he starts bragging about
> how wonderful Coherence is to scale out Oracle databases I ask him:
> - Can I still use SQL everywhere?
>
> From his face, I am far from being the first one asking this question.
>

I'd never heard of it until you mentioned it. Not exactly a database
product, is it? Hard to say exactly what it is, actually.

>
> Oracle certainly bought Coherence because many of their richest
> customers missed some way to seriously scale out their databases. But
> I am sure many are now missing SQL on top of it.
>
>
> Database Clusters? Those seem to be something that many DBAs love to
> hate. Their scalability is limited, unlike the cost and shared storage
> troubles.
>

Clusters, grids, clouds. Similar, but different. I think these are
generally accepted definitions:

* Cluster: General fixed size, managed as a unit, homogeneous, no
security within cluster
* Grid: Specialized servers, heterogeneous, non-trusting
* Cloud: Elastic, heterogeneous, self-managing

To me, the cloud is the exciting platform. It's elasticity and
flexibility would make it too hard to manage by humans, so it has manage
itself. I like that.

I don't know if I mentioned, but the official rejected slogan of
NimbusDB, Inc., is "Where ACID reigns."

--
James A. Starkey
President, NimbusDB, Inc.
978 526-1376



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