IBM releases Hadoop box and database technology for quicker data insights

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Summary:

IBM announced a new PureData appliance for Hadoop and technology for speeding up analytic databases. The announcements come at a good time, with data sets growing and enterprises hankering for easy and fast analysis capability.

IBM talked up the latest ways in which it has sped up databases and introduced a Hadoop appliance at a press and analyst event in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. The developments aim to bring enterprises closer to running analytics on more types and greater quantities of data as close to real time as possible — a higher and higher priority as big-data projects proliferate.

In the long run, as more and more data piles up and in greater varieties, IBM wants to help to prevent its customers from drowning in the deluge of data and instead give them tools to get better results, such as more revenue, said Bob Picciano, general manager of information management at IBM Software. That’s why tools have to be fast, capable of working on huge data sets and easy to use.

Toward that end, IBM announced BLU Acceleration. When a user of an IBM database such as DB2 runs a query, BLU quickly slims down a big set of data to the amount needed for analysis and spreads tiny workloads across all available compute cores to give a result. One feature of BLU — data skipping — essentially fast-forwards over the data that’s not needed and hones in on the small area that is. And with BLU, data can stay compressed for almost the entire duration of the analysis. IBM claimed BLU produces results a thousand times faster than a previous version of the DB2 database without BLU in some tests.

IBM also unveiled another IBM PureData box tailored for big-data purposes, this time around Hadoop. Previous boxes in the line include the PureData System for Analytics. The IBM PureData System for Hadoop appliance will become available later this year. It enables customers to start loading data in 90 minutes, compared with two or three weeks for a company’s Hadoop instance in a data center, said Phil Francisco, vice president of Netezza product management and product marketing at IBM Software. The box can store data processed in Hadoop right in the box, a perk for companies facing retention requirements.

Look for IBM to offer more big-data hardware and software. The company has spent $16 billion on big-data and analytics acquisitions, and it wants to “spend as much organically as well as inorganically to figure out what clients need in this space,” said Inhi Cho Suh, vice president of information management product strategy at IBM Software. Meanwhile, Picciano said IBM will soon come out with a way to do for many servers what the BLU Acceleration does with the processors inside a single server.

The new IBM products sound like they could speed up analytics. If enterprises don’t believe the need is there now, they will as data gets bigger.

MySQL Cluster 7.3 Enables Faster and Simpler Development of New Web and Mobile Services

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News Summary

With the accelerated pace of innovation in Web, cloud, social and mobile services, the new GA release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 makes it simpler and faster than ever for developers to enrich their applications with a highly available and scalable, fault tolerant, real-time database.

News Facts

  Oracle today announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.3.
  With a new NoSQL JavaScript connector for node.js, MySQL Cluster 7.3 makes it simpler and faster to build services deployed across clusters of commodity hardware, with minimum development and operational effort.
  The new release features enhanced capabilities including native support for foreign keys, a browser-based auto-installer and new connection thread scalability, further enabling users to meet the high availability database challenges of next generation Web, Cloud, and communications services.
  Additionally, native integration with the MySQL 5.6 Server enables developers to combine the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster storage engines within a single MySQL 5.6-based application.
  MySQL Cluster is an open source, auto-sharded, real-time, ACID-compliant transactional database with no single point of failure, designed for next generation web, cloud, social and mobile applications.
  MySQL Cluster 7.3 is available for download here. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

Easy to Use plus Uncompromised Availability and Scalability

  MySQL Cluster 7.3 GA builds upon a series of Development Milestone Releases that have enabled users to preview, test and provide feedback during the development process. The latest enhancements include:
  NoSQL JavaScript Connector for node.js: Simplifies development re-using JavaScript from the client to the server, all the way through to the database. Provides node.js with a native, asynchronous JavaScript interface that can be used to both query and receive result sets directly from MySQL Cluster, without transformations to SQL, ensuring low latency for simple queries. The JavaScript Connector for node.js joins a growing portfolio of NoSQL interfaces for MySQL Cluster, which already includes Memcached, Java, JPA and HTTP/REST, enabling NoSQL and SQL access to the same data set.
  Foreign Key support: Simplifies application logic and strengthens data models by automatically enforcing referential integrity between different tables located on different shards, different nodes, or in different data centers. Combines advanced RDBMS features with a highly scalable, real-time distributed database that enforces Foreign Keys across a shared-nothing cluster, while maintaining ACID guarantees and the ability to run cross-shard JOINs to support both high volume OLTP and real-time analytics. Foreign Keys are enforced across applications using both SQL and NoSQL connectors into the Cluster. Modelled on the InnoDB implementation of Foreign Keys, developers can re-use existing MySQL skills.
  MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer: Enables DevOps teams to graphically configure and provision a production-grade cluster in minutes, automatically tuned for their workload and environment, directly from their browser.
  Integration with MySQL Server 5.6: The SQL layer is now based on the latest MySQL 5.6 GA release, enabling DevOps teams to take advantage of the enhanced query throughput and replication robustness of the release. Developers can combine the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster storage engines side by side within a single application using the latest MySQL 5.6 release.
  Connection Thread Scalability: Delivers 1.5x to 7.5x higher throughput per connection to the MySQL Custer data nodes, increasing the overall capacity and scalability of the cluster. The improvement is achieved by splitting mutexes within internal connection APIs. It is completely transparent to applications, which will benefit from higher throughput by simply upgrading to MySQL Cluster 7.3, which itself is an on-line operation.

Supporting Quotes

  “The latest MySQL Cluster 7.3 GA release blends the agility, performance and scale demanded by Web, mobile and emerging application workloads, with the data integrity and high availability only offered by RDBMS platforms,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL Engineering. “It is a winning combination, reflecting the priorities of our largest developers and users.”
  “A key driver for our original selection of MySQL Cluster for our real-time Web recommendations platform was the ability to service not just today’s workloads, but also meet our future needs,” said Sean Chighizola, senior director of Database Administration, Big Fish. “MySQL Cluster 7.3 looks an exciting upgrade – we are evaluating its new features with a view to extending MySQL Cluster to more of our services.”