ReadWriteWeb

Apache has dished out another serving of Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database popular for handling big data. The improvements speak to a maturing NoSQL database that's well-suited for big data deployments. This time around, Cassandra has improvements to its query language, and tuning improvements that will help companies trying to boost performance with a mixture of magnetic media and solid state drives (SSD). Its continued development helps maintain open-source dominance in the big data/NoSQL market.

Big services demand NoSQL, right? With nearly a billion notes and almost 2 billion resource files, Evernote should be ready to jump on the NoSQL and Big Data bandwagon, right? Not so fast, says Evernote's CTO Dave Engberg. According to Engberg, some applications may benefit from modern key-value storage engines, but Evernote has good reasons for sticking with its MySQL setup for account metadata.

In a post yesterday on the Evernote Tech Blog, Engberg says that the ACID-compliance of MySQL's default storage engine (InnoDB) is key to their synchronization model (PDF).

Pentaho Corporation today announced that it has made freely available under open source all the big data capabilities in its Kettle v4.3 release, and has moved the entire Pentaho Kettle project to the Apache License Version 2.0. This is the same open source license that Hadoop and others use. We have covered Pentaho before here.

Last month, veteran IDC analyst Dan Vesset predicted that while Hadoop will become a standard component of the modern data center, by 2015 the market around Hadoop will have matured at such a rate that the major players we recognize today probably would no longer exist. MapR - a commercial Hadoop provider whose name was inspired by the MapReduce programming model for Hadoop - was one of the companies on Vesset's target list for acquisition, and perhaps a ceremonial asterisk for history once Wikipedia emerges from blackout.

So you might expect the predictions of MapR CEO John Schroeder for the year 2012 would not include obscurity for his own company. But Schroeder makes at least an arguable case: The difference, he says, between the database market in 2012 versus the one from 1992 has to do with the customer's preference to refrain from vendor lock-in, and that customer's newfound ability to ensure against it.

Mark Twain said, "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." The speed of putting on boots (if you wear them) hasn't changed much since Twain's day, but lies and misinformation are getting a serious boost out of the Internet. Consider the post about MongoDB that made it all over the Net this weekend thanks to being voted up on Hacker News.

In short, the anonymous Pastebin post slams MongoDB saying "I now feel a kind of social responsibility to deter people from banking their business on MongoDB" and then lists reasons why MongoDB is a bad choice. Sounds like typical HN front-page material, right?

The open source NoSQL graph database that has perhaps attracted the most attention in recent months has been Neo4j, a Java-based DBMS with a RESTful API that supports multiple languages. Earlier this month, Microsoft embraced Neo4j by enabling its use through the Windows Azure cloud platform, whose .NET languages aren't typically associated with Java.

Now, a new commercial distribution of Neo4j premiering this week from Spring Data adds a head-turning new feature for developers: a mapping mode that enables data to be accessible as ordinary Java objects. This means new Java developers won't have to learn the quirks of Neo4j's AspectJ library to access data much the same way they're already doing for Oracle and MySQL Connector/J.

Whether the acronym "NoSQL" stands for "not only SQL," as some database architects content, or literally "no SQL," up until this month, it has been taken to imply "no Oracle." One of the many hallmarks of Oracle's SQL RDBMS technology, historically, has been consistency -- the notion that every client perceives the same view of the data at any one time. Maintaining consistency, among other factors, incurs latency issues as database sizes scale with social media into the stratosphere.

NoSQL databases scale up, but typically at the expense of consistency, which is something you wouldn't think Oracle would want to give up.

Last March, a new company called Gemini Mobile Technologies initiated an innovative, cloud-hosted database platform service, where objects are stored in Gemini's cloud and customers pay only for the space consumed. That service is now called Cloudian; and earlier this week, Gemini took the second step toward achieving competitive par with big names like Oracle Database Cloud Service.

Thanks to a new partnership between Gemini and the community supporting OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, developers building applications for OpenStack can utilize the existing API for Amazon S3, the cloud storage access platform, to connect those applications with Cloudian multi-tenant NoSQL databases.

Not long ago at all, Oracle laid claim to building the systems that managed a majority of the world's data. This year, the group making the same claim is a spinoff from Yahoo.

The onset of Internet-size databases and cloud architectures brought about architectural quandaries about the nature of relational databases that no one had ever thought they'd have to ponder just a few years earlier. Making tremendous strides in this department in a very short period of time -- literally last June -- is Hortonworks, the newly independent company that produces the Apache-licensed open source database system Hadoop, and the latest partner of Microsoft. This week, ReadWriteWeb talks with Hadoop co-creator and Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler.

The huge problem for online services is that traditional SQL database managers don't scale up when database sizes approach "exascale" - the tremendous and fast-growing repositories needed by services like Facebook and Twitter. There's nothing conceptually wrong with SQL, it's just that the underlying RDBMS architecture does not perform well with these tremendous workloads.

Simpler database constructs can handle bigger workloads, as long as the work they do stays more along the lines of simple storage and retrieval and doesn't get too analytical. Today, a new vendor named DataStax whose backers include Rackspace is launching a commercial rendition of an exascale database manager that marries an open source database manager project launched at Facebook with an open source distributed processing project started at Google.