For the week of June 22nd, 2012:

• Is Oracle’s Sun Dying?
• What is NoSQL?

“IOUG Podcast 22-JUN-2012: Oracle’s Dying Sun / NoSQL”

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Is Oracle’s Sun Dying?

According to a recent article published by The Register, a UK-based online tech journal, reverse analysis of Oracle’s recent 2nd Quarter earnings release showed that their Sun hardware-related revenue for the projected close of FY2012, including the Pillar Axiom storage product line, has dropped by an estimated 21 percent when compared with the prior year. In the same period, Oracle’s Engineered Systems product lines, which include Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, SPARC SuperCluster, and the Oracle Big Data Appliance product groups, grew by over 100 percent from US$500 million in FY2011 to US$1.25 billion in FY2012.

Since Oracle does not publish detailed figures by product group, The Register reverse-engineered the Sun-related product numbers by subtracting the Engineered Systems revenue from the published overall revenue numbers for Hardware-related sales and support.  The overall hardware-related revenue fell from just under $7 billion in FY2011 to $6.3 billion in FY2012, or about a 9% drop for the combined hardware business lines.

However, during the same period, when the 100% increase in Engineered Systems sales is removed from those numbers, the residual Sun-related business shows a drop from $6.4 billion in FY2011 to approximately $5 billion in FY2012 or an over 21 percent loss in sales from non-Engineered Systems.

With the acknowledgment of the resignation of Keith Block, VP of North American Sales this week on Thursday (6/21/2012), Block was quoted in a July 2011 Communications Suite instant message to a colleague, “Nobody talks about Sun. Even Sun customers. It’s dead, dead, dead.” His open criticism of Oracle’s sales strategy last year seems to echo the sentiment expressed in Oracle’s latest revenue figures, as well as the renewed marketing efforts the IOUG has been reporting as trending during the months since last year’s 2011 Oracleworld conference.

You may read more about this article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/20/oracle_sun_revenues/

What is NoSQL?

Reviewing Couchbase.com’s Primer on NoSQL Technology, they note that modern web applications can support millions of concurrent users by spreading the load across a collection of application servers behind a load balancer. Changes in application behavior can be rolled out incrementally without requiring application downtime by gradually replacing the software on individual servers. Adjustments to application capacity are easily made by changing the number of application servers. But relational database technology, invented in the 1970s and still in widespread use today, has not kept pace. Horizontal and vertical sharding, distributed caching and data denormalization are only tweaks to fix what is a bigger design issue with traditional RDBMS’s. Organizations such as Google (Big Table) and Amazon (Dynamo) were, out of necessity, forced to invent new approaches to data management resulting in a generation of “NoSQL” or non-relational database technologies.

NoSQL designs share a unique set of characteristics:

No pre-defined schemas are required. Data can be inserted in a NoSQL database without first defining a rigid database schema. As a corollary, the format of the data being inserted can be changed at any time, without application disruption. This provides immense application flexibility, which ultimately delivers substantial business flexibility, especially when dealing with combined structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Auto-sharding (or “elasticity”). A NoSQL database automatically spreads data across servers, without requiring applications to participate. Servers can be added or removed from the data layer without application downtime, with data (and I/O) automatically spread across the server clusters. Most NoSQL databases also support data replication, storing multiple copies of data across the cluster, and even across data centers, to ensure high availability and support disaster recovery. Sharding is also critical when dealing with mobile and cloud-computing application scenarios when the application or device may be disconnected at any time and needs to still maintain data integrity and consistency while the user makes change to the local data set and later re-establishes connectivity.

Distributed query support. NoSQL database systems retain their full query expressive power even when distributed across hundreds or thousands of servers by automatically parallelizing query threads according to where the data logistically resides in the cluster.

Commercial and open source database technologies such as Couchbase (formerly Membase), MongoDB, Cassandra, Riak, and others are now readily available and increasingly represent the “go to” data management technology behind modern web applications which these days are no longer resident on a user’s workstation, but present on mobile devices and in cloud-based virtual infrastructures accessible to millions of users worldwide for even the tiniest of organizations.

You may read more about Couchbase’s vast knowledgebase on NoSQL technology at couchbase.com