Hello, Hekaton! Microsoft Plans In-Memory OLTP SQL Server

November 28, 2012

In a keynote at SQL PASS Summit, Microsoft announced it is bringing In-Memory online transaction processing (OLTP) to the next major release of SQL Server, code named Hekaton. Twitter lit up with chatter about it, and at our booth at PASS, Hekaton was the topic du jour.

Our quick take on Hekaton is that even in-memory databases have transaction logs that are on persistent storage. By utilizing ioMemory as the persistent storage for transaction logs, we accelerate transaction processing, as the logs are being written to constantly. It’s faster to recover an in-memory database as well, because the transaction logs have to be read quickly to recover a database fast. Finally, the backup speed of in-memory databases gets faster if the backups reside on ioMemory.

Hekaton is all about efficiency and performance, the same ideals that drive innovation at Fusion-io. We think Hekaton sounds promising. Here’s to database acceleration!

Here are a few tidbits about Hekaton from around the web:

“Hekaton is the Greek word for 100 times, and Microsoft says that’s the design goal for the peak performance improvements it’s expecting.” Doug Henschen, Informationweek

“Hekaton is currently in private technology preview with a small set of customers, which company officials are planning to expand to 100 before the end of this calendar year.” Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet

“The next version of SQL Server will feature the ability to host database tables or even entire databases within a server’s working memory.” Joab Jackson, Computerworld

“Data has emerged as the new currency of business.” Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, The Official Microsoft Blog

In a recent article in FX-MM, Steven Graves, CEO of McObject, reports on his experience with ioMemory and in-memory databases. Check out “Databases: Have your in-memory performance, and recoverability too.”

 

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Posted by david ricketts

Varonis Data Governance Suite 5.8: Faster, Leaner, Lower Cost

October 5, 2012

We’re extremely excited to announce the release of version 5.8 of the Varonis Data Governance Suite!

This release is packed with major architectural changes that not only increase performance, but also reduce your total cost of ownership and make managing your Varonis infrastructure faster and easier than ever.

What’s new?

Here are some of the key features in 5.8:

  • Collectors: New      component introduced for metadata collection that no longer requires      Microsoft SQL, resulting in better performance, easier deployment, and a      lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
  • Management      Console and Scheduler: Single point to manage and control the      entire Varonis infrastructure, simplifying installation and monitoring.
  • Incremental      File Walk: Ability to incrementally scan/walk only the changed      permissions on the file system rather than the entire file system,      reducing system and network overhead and boosting overall efficiency.
  • Database      Separation: Support for SQL farms external to Varonis components,      increasing architecture flexibility and reducing total cost of ownership.
  • Auditing      Actions: full audit of activities within DatAdvantage increases      organizational security posture by providing immediate accountability for      administrators.
  • User      and Group Creation: Users and groups can be created and edited      from the DatAdvantage interface, increasing administrative functionality      and flexibility.

Our CEO and co-founder, Yaki Faitelson:

“We have changed the architecture of the product so that the people who already rely heavily on DatAdvantage to improve management and security for their unstructured data platforms can integrate it into their workflow even more seamlessly, while those new to the technology will benefit from the experience and input from those who have come before them.”

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Scale Up Your Performance Density with HP IO Accelerators and ioTurbine Software

August 8, 2012

As an update to a previous posting, HP has just published a whitepaper highlighting dramatic TPS performance and VM density using HP IO Accelerators and Fusion’s ioTurbine caching software with virtualized HP DL980 servers.

Benchmark testing demonstrated a 2.8x increase in performance achieved by adding just two 1.28TB IO Accelerators and ioTurbine software to a pair of HP ProLiant DL980 servers running Microsoft Windows 2008 and VMware ESX 4.1, connecting with HP P4800 storage. The configuration supports an aggregated 7120 transactions-per-second (TPS) across 16 VMs running SQL workloads, in parallel. This result compares to 2521 TPS for the same baseline but uncached configuration.

The testing illustrates that this solution not only adds scale to the HP DL980 server but also dramatically increases VM densities to support almost any application, regardless of workload, in a virtual server environment. Having more and larger size VMs makes more efficient use of infrastructure, lowers costs and provides the opportunity to run databases in a virtualized environment, something that was previously not possible or cost prohibitive, at least until now. The solution is an ideal VMware consolidation platform and preserves VMware vMotion and high availability capabilities, important customer requirements.

Of course, this same solution approach can also be attractive for customers interested in using HP IO Accelerators and ioTurbine with other HP servers such as the HP DL580, HP DL380 and the BL460 for bladed environments.

Note also that testing was accomplished with HP’s Gen1 IO Accelerators, so performance results would be expected to be even better using HP’s recently announced ioDrive2 IO Accelerators.

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When it comes to backup, recovery is key

March 20, 2012

When it comes to the cloud backup of data, it seems that we’re constantly bombarded by technologies, speeds and feeds, expensive and low cost solutions, and who’s best out there. We all know backup is important, but sometimes I think that because backup is such a main focus for so many vendors, we often forget WHY we backup in the first place. (So now everyone is saying, “to recover data you idiot.” Keep reading…)

When we look at the SMB space, we’re typically looking at an IT staff of one or two people. These people are also heavily over tasked, and backup is just one of the unglamorous and mundane tasks that has to be done. Not only is the IT staff heavily over tasked, more often than not they’re constantly juggling a “break and fix” solution because of being heavily under budgeted. So at 5:00pm every day, IT has to go into the server room/wiring closet and put in today’s backup tape in hopes that a successful backup is completed by the morning. Sounds simple enough right?

Now, everyone’s entitled to a little time away from work now and again. This is where everything that is bad that can happen, WILL. Now that our faithful IT person is away, this usually gets delegated over to the office manager. Prior to taking vacation, there is a quick meeting that takes place to show our office manager where the tapes are, and what to do on a daily basis in order to get our daily backup done.

Unfortunately what that IT person FAILS to do is show our office manager how to RECOVER data and systems should they need to. Doesn’t it make sense that a backup is useless if we can’t recover from it? So how does showing our office manager how to backup protect the business from downtime should there be a data or system loss event? IT DOESN’T! What if our IT person was out for an entire week and the company lost their Exchange, SQL or other critical server on the first day with nobody having the competency to restore it? The company won’t close down until it’s restored, but how are we expected to continue operations?

I hope that if you’ve gotten this far in this story your head is nodding in agreement to some degree.

Now, let’s look at this exact same scenario if our IT staff from the same SMB Company offloaded the mundane task of backup to a service provider. There would be no need to worry about that tape at 5:00pm every day. No need to hope and pray for a successful backup job to be completed the next morning as our service provider monitors this on our behalf. No need to worry about having to go and ask for capital budget because we have out-dated backup hardware. No need to worry about going on vacation (and yes, IT guys worry about things going wrong when they go on vacation), and no need to train non-technical staff to perform technical operations that effectively don’t serve much of a purpose in the absence of the IT people to begin with.

While that IT person is enjoying their vacation, should there be any data loss, or system outage, our trusted service provider is available 24×7  for anyone in your organization to call to enlist their help to recover (yes, they provide those type of SLA’s for you!).The best part of all of this is that it’s all rolled into a low cost monthly service.

If you’re ready to alleviate the pressure on your internal IT staff, please visit www.c24.co.uk

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When it comes to backup, recovery is key

October 5, 2011

When it comes to the cloud backup of data, it seems that we’re constantly bombarded by technologies, speeds and feeds, expensive and low cost solutions, and who’s best out there. We all know backup is important, but sometimes I think that because backup is such a main focus for so many vendors, we often forget WHY we backup in the first place. (So now everyone is saying, “to recover data you idiot.” Keep reading…)

When we look at the SMB space, we’re typically looking at an IT staff of one or two people. These people are also heavily over tasked, and backup is just one of the unglamorous and mundane tasks that has to be done. Not only is the IT staff heavily over tasked, more often than not they’re constantly juggling a “break and fix” solution because of being heavily under budgeted. So at 5:00pm every day, IT has to go into the server room/wiring closet and put in today’s backup tape in hopes that a successful backup is completed by the morning. Sounds simple enough right?

Now, everyone’s entitled to a little time away from work now and again. This is where everything that is bad that can happen, WILL. Now that our faithful IT person is away, this usually gets delegated over to the office manager. Prior to taking vacation, there is a quick meeting that takes place to show our office manager where the tapes are, and what to do on a daily basis in order to get our daily backup done.

Unfortunately what that IT person FAILS to do is show our office manager how to RECOVER data and systems should they need to. Doesn’t it make sense that a backup is useless if we can’t recover from it? So how does showing our office manager how to backup protect the business from downtime should there be a data or system loss event? IT DOESN’T! What if our IT person was out for an entire week and the company lost their Exchange, SQL or other critical server on the first day with nobody having the competency to restore it? The company won’t close down until it’s restored, but how are we expected to continue operations?

I hope that if you’ve gotten this far in this story your head is nodding in agreement to some degree.

Now, let’s look at this exact same scenario if our IT staff from the same SMB Company offloaded the mundane task of backup to a service provider. There would be no need to worry about that tape at 5:00pm every day. No need to hope and pray for a successful backup job to be completed the next morning as our service provider monitors this on our behalf. No need to worry about having to go and ask for capital budget because we have out-dated backup hardware. No need to worry about going on vacation (and yes, IT guys worry about things going wrong when they go on vacation), and no need to train non-technical staff to perform technical operations that effectively don’t serve much of a purpose in the absence of the IT people to begin with.

While that IT person is enjoying their vacation, should there be any data loss, or system outage, our trusted service provider is available 24×7 for anyone in your organization to call to enlist their help to recover (yes, they provide those type of SLA’s for you!).The best part of all of this is that it’s all rolled into a low cost monthly service.

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Is data the new oil?

July 4, 2011

At C24 we are working with data all the time; whether by delivering it or by storing and managing it. Recently we presented at a SAGE conference; which went extremely well, and it became clear that what we believe about data is true, we have too much.

The challenges we face with the sheer volume of data that we create is where we store it and what can we do with it, whether it is in a MS SQL database, MS Exchange, Oracle or any number of other silos.  Talking to the delegates it became obvious that the main problem is how can we turn this data into a competitive advantage? Business Intelligence has promised a great deal for several years, however it has always been very expensive and limited by the type of databases it can connect too at the right price.

This blog is not about the C24 business intelligence tool it is about data and the value of it. We spotted this video on YouTube and though that it was spot on. The new oil could quite possibly be data. As ever enjoy……

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OLAP’s Only Half The Story

April 20, 2011

Before I start, I’d like to make it absolutely clear that I think OLAP was a great technology and innovation, and when I first got introduced to it, I was blown away.

Although OLAP had been around a while, the first time I really started to become familiar with it was around the turn of the Century. This makes me sound old but also shows how long OLAP has been around. Coming from a relational background and spoon-fed on Oracle, Informix, DB2, Sybase and SQL Server I was firmly in the world of “Structured Query Language”.

I found great joy (and success) in learning how to do clever, unfathomable stuff joining as many tables as I could together in one go and exploring the limits of what was possible from one database supplier to another. However, SQL was and is slow to retrieve data AND SQL is difficult and often a step to far for non-techies to understand and become proficient in.

When I saw OLAP and how easy it was to build a cube it came as a bit of a revelation. Why hadn’t I used this before? Why doesn’t everyone use it? Well… It works well because it’s working over pre-aggregated data. “OK so there is MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP, all different variants of OLAP that either pre-aggregate, partially pre-aggregate or don’t aggregate at the expense of reduced performance… so if you want it to be fast it’s OLAP all the way.”

Building a cube takes time and over large data sets andfor really big cubes, can take hours. It’s this pre-aggregation that give you performance so that’s the trade-off. OLAP only gives you half the story. You can only see the data in an aggregated form and can’t drill through to the transactional data quickly as you have to go from the world of OLAP back to the world of SQL as soon as you go from a number to the raw data. OLAP gives you flexibility through hierarchical dimensions and multiple measures but this is down to the programmer, the person who builds and maintains the cubes often hasn’t a clue what the business really needs and is trying to come up with structures that satisfy the many as opposed to YOU. Move over OLAP and move over SQL.

There is a new way of doing things. A way that gives the business user access to the information they need that is quicker than OLAP, destroys the performance and flexibility of SQL and can be used by non-techies. BI has been around for decades. There are so many products that do more or less the same thing in more or less identical ways. Lipstick on a pig is a good description for modern-day BI. At the end of day it’s still a pig.

A new layer of make up to provide a thin veneer over a fossilised architecture that is based on outdated ideas. Search technology has been designed for speed. Designed for ease of use and designed for the non-techy (and it can be made to run real time…) and the 21st Century. It’s about time someone thought about “Re-inventing Business Intelligence” by starting with a fresh way of thinking. By embracing the latest in search, social media, networking, web and phone. When it comes to BI, move over OLAP and SQL, your time is up!

Wed, 20/04/2011 – 12:10 — Richard Lewis .

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