IBMs Jones: Stinger Targets Enterprises with Automation, Price Freeze - ' ' (
Page 2 of 2 )
People are referring to Stinger and to Oracles Database 10g as representing the second generation of database technology. What does that mean, and whats motivating this evolution?
One [force driving this evolution] is maximizing the value and minimizing the cost of DBA [database administrator] resources. Which means, with the database technology, more automation, so DBAs can do more in the time they have.
Another force is the increasing requirement for information integration. … The whole service-oriented architecture move … is a third, inescapable force. The notion is that you must be able to provide service that can be understood by other applications, easily contacted and easily worked with in an application way, to invoke wherever they sit over the Web.
At the end of this thinking is that with the notion of a Web server and a database server and an application server, customers are growing more and more impatient with having to think of them separately. Theyd rather spend less time thinking of database servers and more time thinking of business logic and better ways to automate business processes.
Stinger incorporates features to serve clustered environments. What does it bring to the table that Oracle 10g doesnt?
Clustering for HA [high availability] is what Oracles RAC [Real Application Clusters] is about. … Weve taken a giant leap forward in Stinger with automation applied to that HA process.
You can have a cluster of two servers, each with a backup. Thats a total of four servers. Two share the database work; two can be failed over if needed. When I hear Oracle talk about clustering, its generally talking about HA clustering.
Click here to read Database Editor Lisa Vaas take on Stinger poking holes in Oracles open-source plans.
Scalability is the ability for database systems to manage increasingly larger amounts of data and increasing amounts of users banging away requesting things.
Because of the architecture with DB2, which is almost antithetical to Oracles architecture, we have customers building warehouses on 150 servers lashed together. One IBM partner in the life sciences got involved with this with Linux. They were building a 1,250-server cluster a couple years ago.
The point is, at least in the high two digits and frequently in the low three digits of servers lashed together is what we see in our accounts.
This second half of clustering, scalability, is the perfect jumping-off point to get to the idea of grid. Grid is the notion of taking both reasons to cluster and doing it in such a seamless fashion that you simply have an enormous data resource to plug into when you need. You dont need to know database servers, their names or where they are.
Grid virtualizes the idea of tapping into an enormous infrastructure to meet requirements for speed, scale and database processing.
[Stinger entails] no earth-shattering drama; weve supported clustering [since the 90s].
[Stinger incorporates] the way weve applied more automation to the HA part of the clustering story for DB2.
Check out eWEEK.coms Database Center at http://database.eweek.com for the latest database news, reviews and analysis.
Be sure to add our eWEEK.com database news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page
