What makes open source databases so scalable?
Posted on March 23, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Enterprise Software, Innovation, Open Source |
Mark and I were having a conversation this morning about open source databases and he asked a really good question when I pointed out that Salesforce.com’s recent outages were due to problems with their Oracle database implementation, while mega sites like Ebay, Google, and Amazon seem to scale just fine with their database infrastructures, which are open source products. Mark asked “what is it about open source databases that makes them so much more scalable than Oracle?” and quite honestly I didn’t have an answer at the time.
Part of the answer no doubt lies in the fact that Oracle 10g is much more than just a database. What Oracle has been promoting is the notion that everything from the database table up to the applications that support it belong in the database, as opposed to a componentized stack where failure of any single piece can be isolated and routed around.
The other thing I think about is that with distributed web technology evolving at the pace that it is the requirement for an all-ecompassing data platform is far less critical. In other words, given the proliferation of semantic technologies that enable far more impressive integrated search, the need for a centralized database certainly diminishes. Also, given that we’ve dumbed down the integration of data across systems to text (XML), a major obstacle to distributed systems has essentially evaporated. Keep in mind that it’s still not end-user easy, but the fact is that it’s a hell of a lot more reliable and cost effective than in years past.
I spend a lot of time considering how incumbents are never really disruptive in a market but rather the victims of disruption that occurs independent of any action or intention they may have taken. Perhaps this is why Ellison spends so much time talking about their new search product, it’s not that he has “Google-envy” but rather he understands that search makes the core principles upon which Oracle was built a lot less attractive. SAP faces our own challenges with regard to how SaaS as represented in our ESA platform ends up potentially unleashing forces that fundamentally change how we compete in our market, but that’s for another post.
Technorati Tags: enterprise software, EnterpriseDB, mysql, open source, Oracle, SAP
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About
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. I am the VP of Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction and I write about a range of topics that interest me, including public policy, technology, entrepreneurship, finance, and global issues.
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