Friday, February 06, 2004

Clusgres: Poor man's RAC(tm)? http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040129/lath071_1.html While Version 1.0 boosts performance of the database for read operations (statistically, the overwhelming majority of all database operations are read operations), Version 1.1 of Clusgres(tm) will provide commensurate performance in write capability as well. This will make Version 1.1, scheduled for the 3rd Quarter of 2004, also suitable for enterprise banking and transaction processing solutions. Note that I suspect 'poor man's RAC' is a bad title: this requires custom h/w (Dolphin interconnect) and a services engagement so I doubt it's for budget-constrained environments. While I still like the idea of a rdbms written from the ground-up to support fault tolerance that can run on commodity hardware (go backplane!), having Clusgres (ugh-that name) available, combined with the ability to run on a mainframe if needed, really adds a lot to the Postgres scalability story. I remember that Moshe Barr founded a company called Qlusters a few years back to commercialize some Mosix-style cluster technology. (... surfing ...) It looks like they're shipping a more generic Linux/SSI clustering product called ClusterFrame, which also uses the Dolphin interconnect. Although general purpose SSI sounds better, hands-down they win on the naming. 10:18:23 AM      comment []  trackback []

State of Massachusetts and Open Standards My neighbor works for Massachusetts as a database programmer. I asked him about the recent policy announcement of a shift to open platforms. He said that as a practical matter it doesn't have much immediate impact. Like a lot of large organizations, Massachusetts leaves buying decisions up to their individual division. What it does do is define reference platforms, and encourage their adoption through documentation/research and volume purchase agreements. It is those reference platforms that will be shifting away from the status quo, and the impact will be felt over time. It's not a City of Largo linux transformation by any means, but it's probably one that has a greater chance of being replicated across the country. 10:15:56 AM      comment []  trackback []