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ODBMS Blog, by Roberto V. Zicari, February 20, 2012
Robert Zicari interview with Dr. John Busch, Founder, Chairman, and CTO of
Schooner Information Technology.
Q1. What are the limitations of MySQL when handling Big Data?
John Busch: Legacy MySQL does not scale well and uses single threaded asynchronous replication. It's poor scaling forces granular sharding across many servers and explicit application code changes to make them sharding-aware. It's single threaded asynchronous replication results in slave lag and data inconsistency, and it requires complex manual fail-over with downtime and data loss. The net result is low utilization of servers, server sprawl, limited service availability, limited data integrity, and complex programming and administration. These are all serious problems when handling Big Data.
Q2. How is SchoonerSQL different with respect to Oracle/MySQL (5.1, 5.5, and the future 5.6)?
John Busch: Schooner licensed the source for MySQL and InnoDB directly from Oracle, with the right to enhance it in a compatible manner. Schooner made fundamental and extensive architectural and resource management advances to MySQL/InnoDB in order to make it enterprise class. SchoonerSQL fully exploits today's commodity multi-core servers, flash memory, and high-performance networking while dramatically improving performance, availability, scalability, and cost of ownership relative to MySQL 5.X. SchoonerSQL advances include:
- very high thread level parallelism with granular concurrency control and highly parallel DRAM < -> FLASH memory hierarchy management, enabling linear vertical scaling as a function of processor cores;
- tightly integrated (DRAM to DRAM) synchronous replication, coupled with fully parallel asynchronous replication, with automated fail-over within and between data centers, enabling the highest levels of availability with no data loss. and
- transparent, workload-aware, relational sharding with DBShards, enabling unlimited high performance horizontal scaling;
... Q7. What is your take on MariaDB?
John Busch: MariaDB is trying to offer an alternative to MySQL and to Oracle.
SchoonerSQL is focused on offering a superior MySQL for mission-critical applications and services, with 100% MySQL compatibility, vastly superior performance, availability, scalability and TCO, all in partnership with the Oracle corporation.
... Q10. How do you differentiate yourselves from other NoSQL vendors (Key/Value stores, document-based databases and similar NoSQL databases)?
John Busch: SchoonerSQL and Membrain are unique in the industry. Schooner has over 20 filed patents on its advances in database/data store architecture and resource management.
SchoonerSQL and Membrain deliver order of magnitude improvements in performance, scalability, availability, and cost of ownership relative to any other MySQL or NoSQL, while maintaining 100% SQL and memcached compatibility.
Q12. A/B testing, sessionization, bot detection, and pathing analysis all require powerful analytics on many petabytes of semi-structured Web data. How do you handle big semi-structured data?
John Busch: As we discussed above, SchoonerSQL provides optimized vertical scaling and clustering coupled with DBShards transparent relational horizontal scaling. This enables queries to be performed on unlimited semi-structured datasets, with 99.999% high availability, full data integrity, and the minimal number of commodity servers.
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