UPDATED 16:05 EDT / APRIL 07 2014

Cloud is the innovation engine, data the gas | #PerconaLive

Roger Levy, PerconaLive 2014, #theCUBE interivew, #PerconaLiveSQL took the lead at #PerconaLive when Roger Levy, VP Product Management at SkySQL joins hosts John Furrier and Jeffrey Kelly on #theCUBE to talk about everything from SkySQL, to the enterprise, to commercialized software, to MariaDB.

SkySQL has a very simple mission according to Levy, who recently left Hewlett-Packard to join SkySQL: To be the commercializer of the enterprise grade distribution of MariaDB. MariaDB is the next generation of MySQL, which is an open source, relational database management system created by Michael Widenius in 1995. MariaDB seeks to continue the innovation and community-lead development around relational databases.

Last week, SkySQL announced MariaDB 10, a community-produced version of the database. This new release brings significant performance improvements in both speed and scalability compared to legacy MySQL code. As one of the more popular forks of MySQL, SkySQL is beefing up its position in the MariaDB community. Mobile consumers very much play a role in the release, as mobile users are not only the majority, but they also are more likely to access cloud services. Thus, companies must still process more data, and the amount is increasing rapidly. From SiliconANGLE’s own Saroj Kar, “The latest versions of MariaDB Enterprise and Cluster supplied by SkySQL is aiming to give managers and database developers more flexibility to manage large amounts of data.”

Cloud is the innovation engine, data the gas

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The cloud market is transforming databases. So what is Levy’s take, and just how connected is the future path of both the cloud and database markets?

“There is so much interconnectivity between what’s happening in cloud and what’s happening in data management,” starts Levy. “One of the motivators for me personally to make the transition from running the HP public cloud into the database market, is quite frankly its all about data. Every time I would give a talk at the executive briefing center at HP we’d always have one slide about every day 4 XoBytes of new data is being created. And while a lot of that data will never be looked at again, will never be managed, will never be searched, there is a huge amount of it that needs management and that creates tremendous amount of data management across all of its forms. Whether its transactional relational, whether its whats being called NoSQL, whether its Big Data in terms of Hadoop derivatives or data warehousing, there is just such tremendous need for efficient, effective data management solutions to help continue to drive the cloud.”

Cloud by itself is providing opportunity for innovation in the data center. Levy uses OpenStack, which he is very familiar with, as a great example. With OpenStack, data and the cloud work together cooperatively.

As the market grows more competitive, Kelly asked Levy if we needed to worry about over-saturating the developer market? According to Levy, there are a lot of lessons to learn from MongoDB’s success. MongoDB demonstrated that if you really think about the core needs of a developer, you’ll hit a home run. Levy suggests that providing a technology with the functionality a developer needs that’s also familiar is critical to nurturing an active developer community.

With the launch of MariaDB 10, Levy told #theCUBE hosts that SkySQL is keenly aware of the need to bring more and more interoperability between the relational database space and the non-relational database space. With MariaDB 10, SkySQL introduced integration with the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database. This ‘gateway’, allows you to read and write to your Cassandra database through MariaDB.

SkySQL is focused on developers having the right tool for the right thing. Connecting to NoSQL is no small feat either. People who go after a NoSQL solution realize that there is an awful lot of work to do to make it function appropriately with your application if you need any kind of transactional function, says Levy. SkySQL wants to offer you a hybrid option.

Levy gives this example: an application that is non-relational and non-structured in capabilities within Cassandra, while you build the transaction oriented portion of your application in MariaDB, and then bridge the both of them together.

In Levy’s own words, “You don’t use a wrench to hammer a nail.”

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SkySQL has loaded MariaDB 10 with features. In classical relational databases, the number of columns per row is fixed. With MariaDB 10, you have the capability to have a dynamic number of columns independent of row specifics. MariaDB 10 is all about scalability too: parallel slave replication, multisource replication…SQL databases like MariaDB remain crucial to almost every enterprise because they can reliably convert real-world business transactions into grouped multi-step operations for consistent data manipulation.

When the Social network giants Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn introduced WebScaleSQL, the scalable and customizable MySQL database, last week, that news was not only big, but served a very specific purpose too, according to Levy.

“I think that puts to rest any questions about whether relational database technologies can scale,” Levy says. “Because if you have a scale issue greater than a Google or a Facebook, we’ve yet to meet those sorts of challenges. A billion user, million and millions and millions of rows per second input into a database, that are being achieved on relational-based technology today, developers don’t have to go and think about losing the benefits of ACID, losing the benefits of a transactional oriented database, just for the stake about worrying about will they scale.”

 

War between SQL and NoSQL + MariaDB’s community

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As Kelly has noted on previous episodes of #theCUBE, when it comes to which is better SQL or NoSQL, it’s more about finding the right technology for the job and tying it to the business requirements, than a SQL vs NoSQL debate. Levy says he doesn’t really see much of a war between the two, and that a lot of the initial confrontation was due to ‘shiny object’ syndrome. The panel agrees that there is a need for education in terms of what the appropriate use cases are, and about the design principles around different technologies.

The MariaDB community is very vibrant, eludes Levy. What starts with the patriarch Widenius trickled down to the 25-30+ key engineers who really created MySQL, taking their work around relational databases into MariaDB. When you add on top of that the extended community, like Google and China’s Kibo, the community members are very actively contributing back code. Levy gave an example of a single developer out of Japan that introduced a Spider Engine for MariaDB recently.

Data is the new asset

Another point of agreement for the panel is that there’s growing activity happening at the data layer. Data as an asset means that data is the driver of  innovation in enterprise IT.

Levy echoed that sentiment, saying, “At the beginning it’s all about data. Computing is a tool, data is an asset. I think we’re just at the very beginnings of people realizing the incredible amount of power there is in data. We’re seeing it now in the explosion of data analytics, data science, and what people are able to do for their businesses for non-profit organizations, for governments by harnessing what’s there. And the need then, of having great solutions to allow you to collect, manipulate, store and manage — that really is where the future is. I think database community and database vendors really are at the center of all that.”

Using data to create an enterprise cloud involves truly understanding the total customer experience. When you move past the emotion and look at the Amazons, HPs, and Rackspaces of the world, you see that most of the clouds operate at or above what many enterprises are able to achieve themselves in their own data centers, said Levy. Security issues as well as downtime and performance issues are much more talked about in the public cloud because, well, it’s public. Public clouds are under constant scrutiny.

“My own view is we are very much approaching the point where these clouds are at or surpass what you can do in your own data center,” concludes Levy. Data is the new asset.


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