Simple(r) DB

Well, many many people have been bombarding me with the new paradigms that they claim will leave the traditional SQL engines in the dust.  Hard to believe that, with a 20+B industry, but nonetheless, every week brings a new one...  To name a few, Google's BigTable (internal use), CouchDB, and now, SimpleDB by Amazon.  All promising to simplify persistence, with a simple query model.  I think all are interesting developments, but comparisons to SQL databases are meaningless here. 

I like them all, but for different reasons.  BigTable, of course, as an abstraction for map-reduce class of applications.  CouchDB, which counts on many fans, including IBM's own Pat Mueller and Sam Ruby (and I am becoming one!), written in Erlang, is very elegant in its capability/simplicity tradeoff.  And now, Amazon, perhaps not satisfied by the availability of structured persistence through eco-systems of the like of Gigaspaces, decides to offer SimpleDB, which is not quite Dynamo (at least in my reading), and is also in Erlang (any relationship to CouchDB? -- I will have to do some more reading), for applications in the cloud. 

Watch this space for our moves in this arena...

Comments

[Jan]

Heya Arant,
SimpleDB and CouchDB are not related. It is currently believed that SimpleDB uses Amazon's Erlang interface to BDB.

I wholeheartedly agree with the statement that comparing all these projects to relational databases is meaningless. They are another solution for a similar set of problems, but surely not the same and there are things where SQL beats anything else hands down.

Also, welcome to the CouchDB-fan-zone :)

Cheers,
Jan
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[Geva Perry]

Anant --

Just to clarify, GigaSpaces plays a very different role than something like a SimpleDB does. GigaSpaces is an application platform -- a distributed application server, if you will -- that lets you built a stateful application that can easily scale across a distributed environment such as Amazon EC2. GigaSpaces manages your business logic, messaging and data. For data it does so through an in-memory data grid, and provides a Persistence as a Service feature that would persist the data to a persistent store such as SimpleDB. So the two solutions are complementary.

Regards,
Geva Perry
GigaSpaces

[Nati Shalom]

To second Geva i would suggest looking the following blog posts on my blog:

Putting the Database Where It Belongs

PaaS – Persistence as a Service (using Hibernate)