back to article Cloudera and MongoDB execs: Time is running out for legacy vendors

"Antipathy" towards legacy database vendors is at an all-time high because Internet of Things data is arriving too fast for them to handle – so say execs at two competitors that went public last year. Both Cloudera and MongoDB released positive results for the second quarter of fiscal 2019 yesterday. For the three months to …

  1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Meh

    Meh

    Based on the revenue numbers, these guys are still small fry. Also, the vast bulk of businesses don't give a shit about IoT. I will agree, however, that the conventional database vendors are a bunch of bar stewards when it comes to licensing and support models, so the market is ripe for some decent competition. Conversely, the licensing costs for NoSQL-based DBs are risible in their own right, so I'm not sure the newcomers are an improvement in that regard.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Meh

      How long have they been at this and they're competing for 1% of the revenue, and probably less of the profits?

      Hadoop does at least have a use case for map/reduce data analysis but you can see that this means competing with Google for anything that doesn't run locally (bandwidth can by the determining factor for anything where this is required).

    2. a_yank_lurker

      Re: Meh

      I suspect most of the customer frustration is not with the db technology but with the vendors. The 'big 3' listed are all notorious for their shakedown antics when comes to 'license audits'. That is enough to get the attention of C-suites and does not bode well for long term commitment. However, that does not mean an alternative db type is the replacement, it just might mean ditching the 'big 3' for something like Postgresql or MariaDB.

  2. AMBxx Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Christine Keeler moment?

    They would say that wouldn't they.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Christine Keeler moment?

      "They would say that wouldn't they."

      That was Mandy Rice-Davis. The Christine Keeler moment was That Chair. You remember it now I've reminded you, don't you?

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Christine Keeler moment?

        Yes, remember now. It was the image of the chair that distracted me

  3. Matthew O'Keefe
    Thumb Up

    The SQL Empire Strikes Back

    The SQL Empire is striking back, and winning.

    Time is running out for NoSQL and big data vendors without a strong scalable SQL story. Their endless financial losses show that unlike Oracle, they haven't been able to connect machine learning and scalable data management to business results consistently and at scale.

    In contrast, Oracle's Exadata platform is the finest and most powerful tool for machine learning available today in the enterprise data center and Oracle's enterprise cloud. Customer after customer is using it to individualize sales offerings, improve product design, increase financial efficiency, and reduce costs.

    Led by Oracle's lightning fast and highly scalable 10-years-young Exadata platform (available on-prem or in the cloud), with Google (Spanner just got full SQL support 1 year ago), Amazon (Aurora is still very new and immature), and others following behind, Oracle is making SQL scale to exabytes of data and trillions of IOPS.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

      On the downside, it means dealing with One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, which is a deal-breaker for many of us.

      1. Matthew O'Keefe

        Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

        I get it. You wouldn't want to make a rational business decision when it's all about the emotion and the past. And the upside is you get to "build-it-all-from-scratch-better-than-Oracle" because that's worked so well in the past that business owners are clamoring for it.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

          @ Matthew O'Keefe

          A new handle appears. Oracle PR or Oracle DBA job hunting?

          1. Matthew O'Keefe

            Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

            That's me:

            https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewtokeefe/

            I preferred my previous handle but Oracle policy does not allow anonymous posting on social media. I thought that people could find my ID through the handle, but apparently not.

            In any case, like any big enterprise company with a complex product line, pricing, and organization, it's hard to make every customer happy. I once accused a good friend of mine of being an Oracle hater and he said "nope, we hate all our enterprise vendors equally". Unsurprisingly, the top concern of almost all customers I talk to these days is the out-of-control, opaque pricing of the leading cloud provider; highly variable OPEX costs are generally unacceptable to businesses, so this will be a limiter for that provider in the future. Oracle, in contrast, has much more predictable and stable cloud pricing, plus SLAs no other vendor provides.

            But I think cloud really changes the game for how Oracle interacts with customers and how you use our products. Cloud is forcing every company to become more relational and less transactional. I personally think that is a good direction for Oracle, because our product line and technology is so good. Seriously, there is so much fixation among The Register readers on the past and that somehow anything older than a few years is stale legacy technical debt that has to be removed. And yet... this is precisely the view that led many down the path of map/reduce, mongodb etc that is clearly kind of a dead end. That work was supposed to be "post-SQL", but in their arrogance their ignored all the hard problems SQL solved via these features:

            Bulk loader -- to transform input data in files into a desired format and load it into a DBMS

            Indexing -- for fast queries

            Updates -- to change the data in the data base

            Transactions -- to support parallel update and recovery from failures during update

            Integrity constraints -- to help keep garbage out of the data base

            Referential integrity -- again, to help keep garbage out of the data base

            Views -- so the schema can change without having to rewrite the application program

            and tool support is lacking:

            Report writers (e.g., Crystal reports) to prepare reports for human visualization

            Business intelligence tools (e.g., Business Objects or Cognos) to enable ad-hoc querying of large data warehouses

            Data mining tools (e.g., Oracle Data Mining or IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner) to allow a user to discover structure in large data sets

            Replication tools (e.g., Golden Gate) to allow a user to replicate data from on DBMS to another

            Database design tools (e.g., Embarcadero) to assist the user in constructing a data base.

            From the recent Spanner paper from Google, which is multi-page mea culpa basically pointing out they should have supported SQL from the beginning:

            “While these systems provided some of the benefits of a database system, they lacked many traditional database features that application developers often rely on. A key example is a robust query language, meaning that developers had to write complex code to process and aggregate the data in their applications. As a result, we decided to turn Spanner into a full featured SQL system, with query execution tightly integrated with the other architectural features of Spanner (such as strong consistency and global replication).”

            "The original API of Spanner provided NoSQL methods for point lookups and range scans of individual and interleaved tables. While NoSQL methods provided a simple path to launching Spanner, and continue to be useful in simple retrieval scenarios, SQL has provided significant additional value in expressing more complex data access patterns and pushing computation to the data."

            That is why Google, Amazon, and Microsoft now aggressively support full SQL in their clouds. SQL has a great future because just as software is eating the world, SQL is eating all the data created in the world. Oracle's unmatched implementation of SQL which runs autonomously in our cloud, with all infrastructure (patching, security, configuration) and performance optimization done automatically, means it will be much easier to consume Oracle database and add business value with much less adoption friction and complexity. It's truly a game changer.

            So my advice is: be strategic. Consider Oracle as an option; hold our feet to the fire; ask the terms you want and see if you can get them. Even if you cannot, see if the business value add still overcomes the extra cost required. But when you do, make sure you add in all the management and complexity costs associated with NoSQL so it's a fair comparison. There's a reason Google, Microsoft, and AWS are all strong supporters of SQL now, so you will be in good company.

            1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

          And yet...

          I know of at least 2 very large UK government departments who have privately stated strategies to "get off Oracle"

          They are fairly neutral about the technology, but the sharp practices by the Oracle sales and license management organisations is what they really object to. Emotion and the past? This is happening now.

          "build-it-all-from-scratch-better-than-Oracle"

          - there are other relational databases out there you know? despite all the wonderful buzzwords in your first post, this is all many of your* customers want

          * I say your as I can't believe you aren't an Oracle employee

          1. Matthew O'Keefe

            Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

            If you are saying that an IT shop can build a better roll-your-own system than Exadata or Oracle Database Appliance, I have to disagree. It's impossible because unlike Oracle, you do not control the complete stack of hardware and software, and therefore cannot vertically optimize across the software-hardware interface. We can do that with the Red Stack. Exadata implementations are routinely 10x as efficient and performance compared to roll-your-own, and this avoids all the time wasted integrating a bunch of industry components by yourself.

      2. ToddRundgrensUtopia

        Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

        or Mathew O'Keefe?

        1. AMBxx Silver badge

          Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

          I spend most of my life querying SQL databases. I can't remember the last time anything new went to Oracle. If the database is application specific, it's normally MS SQL. If it's not, then it's MySQL or PostgreSQL depending upon the age of the application. I get the feeling that there's less MySQL these day too, possibly due to the Oracle ownership.

    2. oxfordmale78

      Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

      Are you employed by Oracle by any chance ?

      I agree that SQL is making a comeback, but your views of Oracle's product are rather optimistic.

      1. LucreLout

        Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

        Are you employed by Oracle by any chance ?

        That or he's balls deep in out of the money options. I can't envisage any other rational reason for someone to be promoting Oracle. It's already dead.

        Hadoop is killing it from the left, Sql Server from the right, MariaDB/others from underneath, and many other cloud-native flavours of NoSQL from above. There's no where for Oracle RDBMS to go; it's basically game over.

        1. Matthew O'Keefe

          Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

          Hadoop is collapsing because of all the reasons I've been mentioning: it's too hard to program and make projects successful.

          Microsoft SQL Server has a place at the table in the low end: Oracle owns the mid-range and high-end. That hasn't changed in decades. And with Oracle's Autonomous Database, there is now a critical capability Microsoft doesn't have and won't have for a very long time.

          Via Oracle Cloud-At-Customer, we can run the exact same database in the cloud, on-prem via exadata, or on-prem in public cloud mode. No other vendor can do this.

    3. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: The SQL Empire Strikes Back

      Dun dun dun!

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    WTF?

    Strongly beholden to the millenial vibe

    "I'm coming close to my four-year anniversary [at MongoDB]," said CEO Dev Ittycheria. "I would say the antipathy towards the legacy vendors has never been higher. So we do see customers very, very motivated to move off their legacy platforms as a function of their relationships with those vendors."

    Nowadays, it's all about the "feelz". (Use the amygdala, Luke!)

    Including moving off a well-working database system to some crazy donkey "document cache" (because always remember: When you’re picking a data store, the most important thing to understand is where in your data — and where in its connections — the business value lies. If you don’t know yet, which is perfectly reasonable, then choose something that won’t paint you into a corner. Pushing arbitrary JSON into your database sounds flexible, but true flexibility is easily adding the features your business needs.)

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Strongly beholden to the millenial vibe

      "Pushing arbitrary JSON into your database sounds flexible, but true flexibility is easily adding the features your business needs."

      I did a job where pushing XML into the database proved flexible. But it was an RDBMS system so best of both worlds.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge

        Re: Strongly beholden to the millenial vibe

        I did a job where we had to convert the SQL result to XML for transport, then back again to a usable result set. Effing stupid idea foisted on me by a CV stuffing project manager.

  5. disgruntled yank

    '"Antipathy" towards legacy database vendors is at an all-time high because Internet of Things data is arriving too fast for them to handle – so say execs at two competitors that went public last year.'

    "Antipathy" (you don't really need the quotation marks) toward Oracle is largely caused by Oracle, chiefly its pricing and sales tactics.

    Antipathy (and you don't at all need quotation marks) toward certain other vendors is caused by their habit of using the term "legacy" to refer to anything they didn't sell you.

  6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "Internet of Things data is arriving too fast for them to handle"

    Simple. Evaluate its worth and treat it accordingly. No need for all this cloudy stuff.

  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    At some point all pushers of latest hot technology are going to wake up to discover that they've become legacy vendors.

  8. RavenDB David
    Thumb Up

    Hybrid Options

    I have heard the same mantra about the new databases replacing the old. Do you mean to tell me a c-suite executive will decide to scrap a multi-million dollar database infrastructure to migrate to the new kid on the block?

    What about the NoSQL databases working in concert with the legacy databases. NoSQL databases can take in data in it's IoT and Graph based forms, and feed it into a SQL solution, creating productivity gains for all.

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