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Enterprize Databases: Mission Critical Commodities


When selecting an enterprise database, developers often choose price over performance

By Edward J. Correia
June 1, 2004 — 
Features, performance and standards support may look great on a press release, but where the rubber hits the road for people deciding on database implementation, the bottom line usually comes down to price.

Paul Strange, director of software development at Selling Source Inc., which builds data-driven Web sites for retailers, said when his company got started, price was the primary factor. "We selected MySQL because we were small, it was free, and because it was well integrated with PHP, our language of choice."

That response was typical of developers and even vendors, as SD Times sought to discover the thinking behind the selection of database products from companies other than the so-called big three: IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

According to Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL AB, cost is often the leading selection factor for the Web-based applications that are typical for MySQL. "We've had a lot of success in the midtier, with ISVs and the very largest companies looking to lower costs." MySQL is free for noncommercial development or if the commercial developer's source code is released under MySQL's GPL; otherwise the software costs US$500 per server with no per-user fees.

Urlocker said that as Web-based applications have become more business critical over time, they also have migrated from the periphery to the data center's core. But despite the database's importance to the enterprise, Urlocker contends that in the eyes of many companies and prospects, it has become a commodity, "and they want to pay commodity prices and not pay for advanced features they can do without."

IBM Corp. responded-and perhaps contributed-to that commoditization in June 2003 with the introduction of DB2 Express, a full-featured version of its relational database engine for Linux and Windows with a starting price of US$499 plus $99 per user. "We have worked to remove price as one of the roadblocks," said Jeff Jones, director of strategy in IBM's Information Management Solutions division.

OPEN SOURCE, OPEN DOORS
Aside from attractive pricing, Urlocker asserted that open-source gives MySQL a major leg up in terms of freedom from vendor schedules and operating system lock-in. "SQL Server is a great product but will only support Windows. Because we're open-source, [developers] are not beholden to our development plans [and can] port it to lesser platforms and ask us to maintain it," which he said the company does routinely. MySQL currently runs on about 20 platforms.

Nevertheless, IBM's Jones claimed that a clearly defined growth path gives DB2 an advantage over open-source solutions. "If I push the limits of Express, it's just a license change to go to Workgroup edition, or expand into cluster implementations with Enterprise edition. I am not forever bound by the limits of the small database I started with."

GeoNorth LLC, a database consultancy, has learned to expect vendor lock-in. "The first question we ask is, 'What are they currently using?'" said Marshall Payne, co-founder of the Anchorage, Ala.-based company. "Often, people will buy a commercial system that has a dependency on a specific database like Oracle or SQL Server," which he said locks developers in for subsequent projects. "That happens a lot."

For customers that have not made significant investments in a database technology, Payne said the choice usually boils down to cost rather than functionality. "Looking at different database flavors, SQL Server tends to fit the bill for small to midlevel organizations because of its low cost and simplicity of licensing."

MySQL NOT THEIR SQL

After about seven years using MySQL exclusively, Selling Source's Strange said customers began requesting demographic data from their applications, and MySQL hit a wall.

He explained that the demographic analyses required queries across aggregate result sets that returned hundreds of rows instead of just one row, and that some of the values being joined against were not indexed. "We quickly learned that MySQL had a problem with that; it slowed down."

Strange said that indexing and modifying the database structure improved performance a bit, but not sufficiently to solve the problem. "Once we hit about a million rows, even queries against the index would slow the server down."

Selling Source then set about selecting a replacement database, and narrowed the field to three: IBM's DB2, InterSystems' Cach? and Oracle's 8i. "We loved the idea that Cach? was object-oriented, [but] the change in development model was so drastic that our [SQL] developers couldn't quite grasp it," he said of their evaluation of InterSystems.

As for Oracle, "it took five or six phone calls to Oracle before someone would return our call," their technical questions went unanswered for weeks, and Oracle's six-figure price tag was well over their $60,000 budget.

IBM was selected, once again with price as a major factor. "The support during the presales experience was phenomenal, and they came in at around $20,000-well under budget," Strange said.

But Selling Source's DB2 migration may not have been necessary. Corey Ostman, CTO at PriceGrabber.com LLC, said his online comparison shopping site maintains a MySQL database with hundreds of tables spread across many servers. He puts the total number of rows at around 200 million. "We have not seen any performance degradation within tables greater than a million rows," Ostman said.

PriceGrabber has been using MySQL since the company began in 1999; it now boasts about 12 million users. "We often do queries against tables with 10 million rows that are part of a three- or four-table join with excellent performance," he claimed.

Ostman said that queries are fine-tuned using the EXPLAIN command, which returns a table showing which search strategy MySQL's optimizer used for a particular SQL statement.

PERCEPTION IS REALITY
What one developer perceives as a slow database, another may be certain is not. IBM also has suffered, Jones said, from the perception that it offers just mainframe database software. "That hasn't been true since 1993, when we first gave birth to DB2 on Unix." Unix edition pricing starts at US$999 per server plus $249 per user.

GeoNorth's Payne said that when offered a choice among the big three, customers often favor Microsoft. "There's a perception we deal with that Oracle and [IBM] 'nickel and dime' you with modules and other things that have to get added unexpectedly to finish the job."

Another barrier to adoption, Payne said, is the perceived cost of the database administrator. "A trained Oracle DBA usually commands a higher salary" than his SQL Server counterpart, he said. There's also an expectation within companies that they may not be able to attract a high-end Oracle DBA because of the reduction in pay that person will be forced to accept, he added.

Claiming less administration than competitors among its differentiators is Sybase Inc. with its Adaptive Server Enterprise, which starts at US$1,495 for five users. Sybase says ASE's main benefit is its ability to process queries on highly dynamic data. "Sybase ASE has a single multithreaded kernel that enables us to handle problems where there's a very great change rate in the data," said Tom Traubitz, senior group product marketing manager of Sybase's enterprise data management products.

"Many of our customers can't look at an image that's 10 minutes old, because in many cases, that's too old," Traubitz continued, citing securities trading and military intelligence applications as examples. "These are applications where you have to look at the data as it's changing and make decisions on that changed data right then and there."

Mike Paola, senior group product manager for Sybase's SQL Anywhere line of application-specific and mobile database development tools, said that companies with investments in a mixture of database products can benefit from iAnywhere's Synchronization Server. "Let's say you want to use your SQL database on laptops. We can synchronize directly with back-end databases from Microsoft, Oracle and IBM." Mobile solutions from those companies, he said, "are typically vendor-specific unless you put in a second-tier staging database."

NO TIME FOR FEATURE BLOAT
Whether real or imagined, another perception is that vendors increase features to justify maintenance contracts. "Oracle can provide a five-page list of features we don't have and say that's why you should buy Oracle," said MySQL's Urlocker, citing Oracle's grid capabilities for emphasis. "But we look at that and say that's why you should buy MySQL, because you often don't need those features, and who in IT has time to look at them all?"

Urlocker asserted that software vendors across the industry add new features to justify their maintenance charges. "Sometimes those features are good, but there's a cost to that feature bloat in terms of complexity and expertise required to manage it. Developers are just trying to get their applications up and running with a minimum of fuss and complexity."

Defending its regimented update cycle is PointBase Inc., which revs its all-Java SQL databases every four months. "That allows us to incrementally improve the product on a regular basis," said Alec Beaton, technical support manager at PointBase, a division of DataMirror Mobile Solutions Inc. "Also, if you need a new feature or have a serious problem that can only be fixed in a new release, you don't have to wait a year; it's four months at most."

Again defending the open-source paradigm, Urlocker described MySQL's bug reporting process. "When people report a defect, they often identify the line and the module so we can validate and correct it immediately. If you send a bug to a large software company, you sometimes never hear from them. It's nice to know that if you do find a bug, you have the freedom to fix it yourself."


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