Where NASA and Instagram get open source databases

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has announced the PostgreSQL 9.2 open source database with native JSON support, covering indexes, replication and performance improvements.

NOTE: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text-based data-interchange format programming language that is widely agreed to be "easy for humans to read and write" and is equally easy for machines to "parse and generate" in use. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript programming language and is said to use conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages.

But what does "performance improvement" really mean with this kind of technology?

Vendors of all kinds love to use the term "performance" time and time again, so what makes an open source next-generation database operate and, well, perform, so well in this case?

How it works...

The answer appears to lie in PostgreSQL 9.2's ability to execute "linear scalability" across 64 processor cores to share out the burden of processing. This separation of workloads... plus its 'index-only' scans and reductions in CPU power consumption are what actually speed up this product.

NASA, Instagram and HP can't be wrong? Can they?

Organisations including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Instagram and NASA run applications on PostgreSQL and HP has adopted it too to power its HP-UX/Itanium solutions.

Improvements in vertical scalability are also said to increase PostgreSQL's ability to efficiently utilise hardware resources on larger servers.

So just how fast is fast here?

Numerically, this means:

* Up to 350,000 read queries per second
* Index-only scans for data warehousing queries
* Up to 14,000 data writes per second

NOTE: PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64) and Windows.

Open Source XML Database

As quoted from Wikipedia, an XML database is a data persistence software system that allows data to be stored in XML format. This data can then be queried, exported and serialized into any format the developer wishes.

Two major classes of XML database exist:

1. XML-enabled: these map all XML to a traditional database (such as a relational database), accepting XML as input and rendering XML as output. This term implies that the database does the conversion itself (as opposed to relying on middleware).

2. Native XML (NXD): the internal model of such databases depends on XML and uses XML documents as the fundamental unit of storage, which are, however, not necessarily stored in the form of text files.

Read more..

Open Source Object Databases

db4o is the open source object database that enables Java and .NET developers to store and retrieve any application object with only one line of code, eliminating the need to predefine or maintain a separate, rigid data model.

Prevayler is an object persistence library for Java. It is an implementation of the System Prevalence architectural style, in which data is kept hot in memory with changes journaled for system recovery.

Both db4o and Prevayler are fast and they actually let you deal with object directly, and thus make them very developer friendly. For RDBMS you need to either use OR mapper or SQL directly.

In my optiion, if performance is your number 1 priority and memory is not an issue, then you should consider using object database. An interesting study can be found at Open Source Database Benchmark. Read More..

MySQL: World’s Most popular Open Source database

What is MySQL?
MySQL is an Open Source database management system(DBMS) that one can download for free from MySQL Website (www.mysql.com). MySQL is one of the world’s most popular systems for Java web applications because of its consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use. MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, giving the developers right kind of flexibility.

MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project’s source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

Why is MySQL more popular among Web Developers?

1. Inexpensive: MySQL is free for most of the uses and relatively inexpensive for other enteroprise support
2. Fast: MySQL is one of the fastest relational databases currently available.
3. Easy To Use: MySQL is easy to use and install when compared to other DBMS
4. Portable: MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, giving the developers right kind of flexibility.
5. Supports Strutured Query Language(SQL) and provides most of the features that one would expect from a modern RDBMS.

What does MySQL Provide?

1. SQL Support: MySQL supports SQL which is the standard language for working with relational databases.
2. Multiple Client Support: MySQL supports access from multiple clients and also supports multiple programming langauges including PHP, Java, Perl, Python, and C.
3. Connectivity: MySQL can provide access to data via Internet or intranet
4. Security: MySQL provide security so that only authorised users can view the data.
5. Referential Integrity: MySQL provides support for referential integrity just like commercial databases such as Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL Server.
6. Transaction Processing: MySQL 5.0 provides support for transaction processing just like other commercial databases
Read More..

Microsoft Puts Weight Behind Open Source Projects With Web Platform Installer

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for championing open source projects. So it’s rather surprising (in a good way) to see the company release something called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which makes it possible to batch install a set of open source projects on Windows Vista or Server 2008.

These projects include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress. As InfoWorld points out, Microsoft itself isn’t technically the distributor of these projects since users are merely obtaining them from third party developers through Microsoft’s new installer.

The platform is capable of running both ASP and PHP-based applications, and it consists of a suite of tools including Visual Web Developer for creating websites, Microsoft SQL Server for administering databases, and IIS7 for serving webpages. As such, the bundling of these open source packages is a rather clever way for Microsoft to promote the use of its proprietary server software over popular open source alternatives such as Apache and MySQL. Ironic, yes, but selective promotion of open source is better than none at all.

Read More...

Microsoft Whips out Silverlight 2

Monday Microsoft announced that they’ll soon release version 2.0 of their rich Web application plug-in, which the company is pushing as an alternative to Adobe’s Flash.

Silverlight 2, however, comes with a twist. Microsoft have decided to take it one step further from the direction the plug-in was currently taking – mostly web videos – and add a portion of the Redmond company’s .Net framework technology, as well as support for modern programming languages like C#, Python, and Ruby. Videos haven’t been forgotten though, and enhanced video support will be included. Silverlight 2 can also call Web services and Atom endpoints to support componentized Web apps. Read more..

Open Source XML Database

As quoted from Wikipedia, an XML database is a data persistence software system that allows data to be stored in XML format. This data can then be queried, exported and serialized into any format the developer wishes.

Two major classes of XML database exist:

XML-enabled: these map all XML to a traditional database (such as a relational database), accepting XML as input and rendering XML as output. This term implies that the database does the conversion itself (as opposed to relying on middleware).
Native XML (NXD): the internal model of such databases depends on XML and uses XML documents as the fundamental unit of storage, which are, however, not necessarily stored in the form of text files. Read more..