Stepping Up in Class

Midtier database vendors finding their customers need same heavy-lifting functionality as larger organizations

By Shari L. Gold

July 1, 2005 —

A trend is emerging among midtier database vendors: Their customers want high-end functionality without the installation, maintenance and financial responsibilities it demands. The problem lies in the fact that these organizations often do not have the means to hire dedicated database administrators and developers.

Some of the leading midtier vendors see the demand to compete with the functionality offered by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to be their greatest challenge. Where issues such as service-oriented architectures, Radio Frequency Identification, regulatory compliance and larger data storage capacity once were the sole province of large companies, the smaller midtier users now also must deal with these new demands.

These companies, noted Brendan Coveney, president and CEO of 4D, will be “hit with so much data in the near future.” 4D offers 4th Dimension, a database for Mac OS X and Windows.

That mountain of data, according to Tony Gaughan, vice president of development at Computer Associates, creates levels of complexity smaller organizations haven’t had to deal with before. “The most significant problem that application developers face today, and why the better portion of application development efforts fail, is the massive complexity associated with the number of components that are involved in even the most rudimentary systems,” he said.

The days of knowing one database and one supporting language are over. Today, developers need to be familiar with legacy, relational and object databases on the back end, and they need to have detailed knowledge of application servers, Web servers, scripting languages and even more for the middle tier. Thick- and thin-client technologies, Web services, XML, WSDL and HTML also are on the list of must-knows. Database developers need to master all of these technologies to be successful.

“The number of different types of application architectures is frightening,” said Gaughan.

OPEN ALTERNATIVES
One way midtier database vendors Computer Associates and Sleepycat Software reduce the learning curve is by offering standards-based, open-source alternatives to the “Big Three”—IBM’s DB2, Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle 10g. Database developers need the flexibility of writing applications for one platform that can be deployed effortlessly against any other platform, said Gaughan.

Another essential factor often associated with open-source databases is their compliance with standards-based access, including ODBC, JDBC and .NET data provider interfaces, said Gaughan, making open-source options such as Computer Associates’ Ingres r3 plug-and-play compatible with other databases.

“Providing access to the Ingres source code to application developers has enabled them to understand the inner workings of the DBMS and helped them architect solutions that can leverage this knowledge to maximize performance,” Gaughan said.

Of course, there also is a cost benefit to using open-source database software. It’s often free, with service offered a la carte as needed.

As for features usually reserved for the large databases, Computer Associates plans for its Ingres r4 release to provide self-tuning and self-healing capabilities through its Ingres Management Architecture with round-the-clock availability. Ingres r4, due out in 2006, also will feature a database grid solution that allows a single query to be executed seamlessly across a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, acting in parallel to provide quick results. Developers will not need to understand the composition of the grid to implement Ingres r4 successfully, said Gaughan. Also, to satisfy application demands, nodes can be added to and removed from the grid transparently.

Sleepycat’s focus is on providing high availability and a high level of fault tolerance within its line of embedded databases. Rex Wang, Sleepycat’s vice president of marketing infrastructure, said the current release of Berkeley DB, version 4.3, features performance scalability, faster runtime, ease of use for a larger group of customers, and ease of development for less sophisticated developers.

NEVER ENOUGH STORAGE
Wang said database developers today need to be ready for the trend toward different types of data storage, such as the proliferation of network devices and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) with distributed applications. Distributed computing demands fast, local persistence within devices or components of an SOA and must function without manual care and feeding, which is a need not well served with traditional client/server databases, said Wang.

Developers should not be required to solve the technology problems created when companies implement massive architectural changes, said 4D’s Coveney. For example, in a transition from Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, some 70 percent of the transition costs are consumed by development time and the learning curve involved, he claimed.

Coveney said improving power and rewriting the database engine are goals 4D is planning for its next release of 4th Dimension to meet the demands for newer Web services standards. The company also is considering further integration with other platforms, such as Linux, and back-end integration with Web-based companies, such as eBay Inc.

Key to helping database developers meet storage demands introduced by distributed architectures and technologies, said Sleepycat’s Wang, is for the database to store data in the applications, requiring no database maintenance on the part of developers or administrators. By storing data in the application’s data format, no need exists for translation of the data, which he said is unique to Berkeley DB. Also unique is Berkeley DB’s API and the in-process nature of the database.

With Berkeley DB, libraries are tied to the applications, and are used frequently in the address space of the applications. “The only thing talking to us is the application,” said Wang.

Developers in specific areas such as health care or the financial fields face pressures that other developers may not face, said Tom Traubitz, Sybase’s senior group manager with the information technology solutions group. Writing database applications for event-driven enterprises adds pressure to address the demand for real-time data services in ways that are not intrusive.

Traubitz said companies are demanding the request/reply behavior in databases so they can be alerted at certain times, in real time, to events such as when the price of a security reaches a certain level. Databases need to be sophisticated enough to provide event-driven functionality by interfacing with different messaging buses in real time with no database modifications required to set them up. Also, databases need the ability to generate messages from within the database, he said.

Databases also need to handle work on data during transactions without having to set up a separate data warehouse for data being used. Information needs to be available in real time for this market, so databases need to handle a mixed workload with no secondary databases required, said Traubitz.

Sybase’s Adaptaserver Enterprise version 15, shipping this fall, provides technologies to deal with very large databases, a new query optimizer for complex workloads, and blends even more functionality of data warehousing and high-performance transaction processing, said Traubitz. Due for release this summer for developers, Sybase Workspace will provide a database tooling product for building service-oriented architectures and event-driven applications.

WEIGHING THE COSTS

Databases that power Web sites now are being used in many of the largest Internet sites for massive, scaled-out applications, said Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL, which offers an open-source database. “Companies like Sabre, Yahoo, Google, Omniture, Friendster and City Search/Evite have hundreds and even thousands of servers,” he said. “By using cheaper commodity hardware and MySQL instead of more expensive databases and higher-end machines, they’ve been able to save millions of dollars.”

Total-cost-of-ownership when implementing highly functional databases in the midtier market means IT departments must do more with less and “justify every dollar spent,” said CA’s Gaughan. MySQL echoes that cry with its claims that database administrators using MySQL can manage two to three times as many servers than with the Big Three, and that database administration “scales much better with MySQL than traditional databases,” said Urlocker.

Urlocker said MySQL’s mission has always been to make database management simple, affordable and easy to develop and deploy. “We have never been interested in bloating our software with every new bell and whistle under the sun,” said Urlocker. “Our self-imposed ‘15-minute rule’ says a user should always be able to download, install and be up and running with MySQL in a quarter of an hour.”

MySQL Community Edition offers “do-it-yourselfers” a money-saving database as a freely available option. MySQL Network provides a quicker option for those companies willing to spend a little more money, said Urlocker, and comes with 24x7 support and guaranteed 30-minute response times. Partner companies—including Embarcadero, GoldenGate and Quest—join MySQL in developing new tools and services around MySQL.

All of which means the midtier players are making progress in bringing their offerings more in line with those of the Big Three.

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