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The Fog is Getting Thicker…
San Francisco in fog (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I renamed this so that Teradata folks would not get here so often… its not really about Intelligent Memory… just prompted by it. The post on Intelligent Memory is here. – Rob
Two quick comments on Teradata’s recent announcement of Intelligent Memory.
First… very very cool. More on this to come.
Next… life is going to become very hard for my readers and for bloggers in this space. The notion of an in-memory database is becoming rightfully blurred… as is the notion of column store.
Oracle blurs the concepts with words like “database in-memory” and “hybrid column compression” which is neither an in-memory database or a column store.
Teradata blurs the concept with a strong offering that uses DRAM as a block-IO device (like the old RAM-disks we used to configure on our PCs).
Teradata and Greenplum blur the idea of a column store by adding columnar tables over their row store database engines.
I’m not a fan of the double-speak… but the ability of companies to apply the 80/20 rule to stretch their architectures and glue on new advanced technologies is a good thing for consumers.
But it becomes very hard to distinguish the products now.
In future blogs I’ll try to point out differences… but we’ll have to go a little deeper into the Database Fog.
Memory Trends and HANA
If the Gartner estimates here are correct… then DRAM prices will fall 50% per year per year over the next several years… and then in 2015 non-volatile RAM (see the related articles below) will become generally available.
It has been suggested that memory prices will fall slower than data warehouses will grow (see here). That does not seem to be the case… and the combination of cheaper memory and then non-volatile memory will make in-memory databases like SAP HANA ever more compelling. In fact, as I predicted… and to their credit, Teradata is adding more memory (see here).
Related articles
Data Recovery in HANA, TimesTen, and SQLFire
There is a persistent myth, like a persistent cough, that claims that in-memory databases lose data when a hardware failure takes down a node because memory is volatile and non-persistent. This myth is marketing, not architecture.
Most RDBMS products: including Oracle, TimesTen, and HANA; have three layers where data exists: in-memory (think SGA for Oracle), in the log, and on disk. The normal process goes like this:
- A write transaction arrives
- The transaction is written to the log file and committed… this is a very quick process with 1 sequential I/O… quicker still if the log file is on a SSD device
- The query updates the in-memory layer; and
- After some time passes, saves the in-memory data to disk.
Recovery for these databases is easy to understand:
- If a hardware failure occurs and #1 but before #2 the transaction has not been committed and is lost.
- If a hardware failure occurs after #2 but before #3 the transaction is committed and the database is rebuilt when the node restarts from the log file.
- If a hardware failure occurs after #3 but before #4 the same process occurs… the database is rebuilt when the node restarts from the log file.
- If a hardware failure occurs after #4 the database is rebuilt from the disk copy.
SQLFire uses a different approach (from here):
“Unlike traditional distributed databases, SQLFire does not use write-ahead logging for transaction recovery in case the commit fails during replication or redundant updates to one or more members. The most likely failure scenario is one where the member is unhealthy and gets forced out of the distributed system, guaranteeing the consistency of the data. When the failed member comes back online, it automatically recovers the replicated/redundant data set and establishes coherency with the other members. If all copies of some data go down before the commit is issued, then this condition is detected using the group membership system, and the transaction is rolled back automatically on all members.”
Redundant in-memory data optimizes transaction throughput but requires twice the memory. There are options to persist data to disk… but these options provide an approach that is significantly slower than the write-ahead logging used by TimesTen and HANA (and Oracle and Postgres, and …).
The bottom line: IMDBs are designed in the same manner as other, disk-based, DBMSs. They guarantee that comitted data is safe… everytime.
P.S.
See here for how these DBMSs compare when a BI/analytic workload is applied.
A Quick Five Minute Rule Update for In-memory Databases
Following on to my blog on the Five Minute Rule and in-memory databases here I decided to quickly and informally recalculate the 4KB break-even point based on current technology (rather than use the 2007 numbers) The results are as follows:
- A 1TB SATA Disk with 4.2ms average latency and 126MB/s max transfer rate costs $100 here
- A 4GB DDR3 ECC memory card costs $33 here (I picked fairly expensive ECC memory… I could have gone with the $18 average price mentioned here)
- Apply the Gray/Putzolu formula: Break Even Interval = (Pages per MB of RAM/Accesses per Second per Disk) * ($ per Disk Drive/$ per MB of RAM)
And we find that today the break-even point for a 4KB block of data is 55 minutes…
Again… this means that for any 4KB block of data… or for any database table where there are 4KB blocks that are touched… within a 55 minute window it is more cost-effective to keep the data in-memory than to move it back and forth from disk. If the data is compressed the duration increases with the compression so that a table with 2X compression should reside in-memory if accessed on the average every 110 minutes.
Co-processing and Exadata
In my first blog (here) I discussed the implications of using co-processors to offload CPU. The point was that with multi-core processors it made more sense to add generalized processing hardware that could be applied to all parts of the query process than to add specialized processors that dealt with only part of the problem.
Kevin Closson has produced two videos that critically evaluate the architecture of Exadata and I strongly suggest that you view them here before you go on with this post… They are enlightening, irreverent, and make the long post I’ve been drafting on Exadata lightweight and unnecessary.
If you have seen Kevin’s post you understand that Exadata is asymmetric and unbalanced. But his post extends and generalizes my discussion of co-processing in a nice way. Co-processing is asymmetric by definition. The co-processor is not busy after it has executed on its part of the problem.
In fact, Oracle has approximately mirrored the Netezza architecture with Exadata but used commercial processors instead of FPGAs to offload I/O and predicate processing. The result is the same in both cases… underutilized processing capability. The difference is that Netezza wastes some power on relatively inexpensive FPGA processors while Exadata wastes general and expensive CPU resources that might actually be applied usefully elsewhere. And Netezza splits the processing within a shared-nothing architecture while Exadata mixes architectures adding to the inefficiency.
Exalytics vs. HANA: What are they thinking?
I’ve been trying to sort through the noise around Exalytics and see if there are any conclusions to be drawn from the architecture. But this post is more about the noise. The vast majority of the articles I’ve read posted by industry analysts suggest that Exalytics is Oracle‘s answer to SAP‘s HANA. See:
But I do not see it?
Exalytics is a smart cache that holds a redundant copy of aggregated data in memory to offload aggregate queries from your data warehouse or mart. The system is a shared-memory implementation that does not scale out as the size of the aggregates increase. It does scale up by daisy-chaining Exalytics boxes to store more aggregates. It is a read-only system that requires another DBMS as the source of the aggregated data. Exalytics provides a performance boost for Oracle including for Exadata (remember, Exadata performs aggregation in the RAC layer… when RAC is swamped Exalytics can offload some processing).
HANA is a fully functional in-memory shared-nothing columnar DBMS. It does not store a copy of the data.. it stores the data. It can be updated. HANA replaces Oracle… it does not speed it up.
I’ll post more on Exalytics… and on HANA… but there is no Exalytics vs. HANA competition ahead. There will be no Exalytics vs. HANA POCs. They are completely different technologies solving different problems with the only similarity being that they both leverage the decreasing costs of RAM to eliminate the expense of I/O to disk or SSD devices. Don’t let the common phrase “in-memory” confuse you.
Greenplum and Teradata: Simliar Architecture, Different Strategies
Hardware systems, servers and network fabric, provide the foundation upon which all shared-nothing database management systems rest. Hardware systems are a major contributor to the overall price/performance and total cost of ownership for a data warehouse platform. This blog considers the hardware strategies of EMC/Greenplum: applying the idea of using common, off-the-shelf (COTS) components to build a competitive foundation; and Teradata: developing a proprietary hardware system by tightly integrating components.
Strategies
The Teradata hardware strategy is simple to describe. They expend R&D dollars to couple low-level technologies into a tightly integrated system. Their servers are custom-designed within a set of guidelines that allows both the LINUX and Microsoft Windows operating systems to execute there. Their network fabric is highly proprietary, using cycles within the fabric to offload sort/merge data processing from the server CPU.
In other words, Teradata believes that the time and effort required to engineer an integrated proprietary offering will improve the performance of their offering enough to offset the cost.
EMC and Greenplum have taken a different approach. They have elected a strategy that leverages off-the-shelf servers offered by hardware vendors like Dell or HP, and network switches from vendors like Brocade, Arista, and Cisco. They have elected to expend few dollars on hardware design and development and to leverage the R&D investments made by these other vendors. In other words, Greenplum believes that the advantages in price and performance provided by using off-the-shelf hardware provides a sustainable advantage.
Price
The lower costs associated with Greenplum’s strategy clearly provide an advantage. Greenplum does not have to expend to design and manufacture custom hardware. The manufacturing costs may not be significant, but the staff costs required by the Teradata strategy must affect the price. Clearly the Greenplum strategy provides an advantage on the price side.
Performance
The Teradata strategy has to be about performance… so lets speculate:
- How much of a performance increase might their integration provide on the server-side?
- How much of a performance increase might their integration provide on the network side?
In the days before there was a microprocessor based enterprise server market, Teradata could gain substantially here. Microprocessors were built for personal computing and not designed for the high-availability and high-performance requirements in an enterprise. Teradata had much to gain from building rather than buying server.
But today, there is little to gain from a highly customized design. The requirement to run standard LINUX and Windows operating systems limit their ability to innovate and the resulting servers have to be very similar to those built for off-the-shelf enterprise servers. There is little or no performance advantage here.
On the network side, there once was a distinct advantage to Teradata’s ByNet. It was both faster than available off-the shelf switches and it offloaded cycles from the under-powered CPU. Today, however, there are plenty of cheap, fast switches… so the speed advantage has disappeared. Worse still, the introduction of multi-core CPUs have eliminated the advantage of the in-the-switch sort/merge that makes ByNet unique. CPU is inexpensive these days.
The bottom line: it is unclear if the Teradata hardware strategy affords them a performance advantage.
Cost of Ownership
An argument could be made that supporting COTS hardware is inherently less expensive than supporting a Teradata cluster. But there is a more substantial savings that is clear.
Every 2-3 years, as newer Teradata technology obsoletes your currently installed cluster the value of the current hardware goes to zero and the cost of ownership goes up significantly. The costs of this are especially high when you are required to add several nodes to accommodate growth as Teradata refreshes their technology. You may have to buy servers that are already obsolete.
With Greenplum, your current cluster is built from general-purpose servers that are re-purposed with ease. In fact, since the nodes in a Greenplum cluster are usually high-end servers, customers often cycle new technology into their data warehouse and cycle the old servers out into their server farm. The result is a higher performance warehouse and full use of all of the server technology.
A Final Word
The words “proprietary hardware” are sometimes thrown around as an insult. But Teradata’s proprietary approach is based on the belief that a tightly integrated configuration adds benefit to offset the costs. Greenplum believes that today the enterprise server and the network switch vendors have matured their products to the point where off-the-shelf technology can match or exceed the performance of custom hardware… at a significantly reduced cost. You may have an opinion or you may wait to see how the benchmarks, the proof-of-concepts, and the market decide… but its interesting to understand the differing approaches.
Stop Tuning and Scan…
After years of tuning data warehouses, queries, data loads, and BI applications, I give up. In the long run it is not really possible anyway… and better still… no longer necessary. A better approach is to build your database and your hardware infrastructure to scan fast and smart. So here’s a blog on why it’s impossible to tune a warehouse… and on why it’s no longer necessary.
My argument against tuning is easy to grasp. By definition a data warehouse serves many constituencies: Marketing and Finance and Customer Support and Distribution; and these business units will each access the data from their unique perspective following a unique path through the warehouse. A designer cannot lay out the data effectively to support each access path… cannot index every column, cannot map more than one zone, cannot replicate the data again and again with aggregates and materialized views, cannot cache the entire warehouse. Even if you get it right changing business requirements will fracture your approach; or worse, the design will not support new queries and constrain your business.
Many readers will be skeptical at this point… suggesting that the software and hardware to eliminate tuning does not exist. So let’s build a model and test the state of the art.
Let us imagine and model a 25TB data warehouse with a 20TB fact table that holds 25 months of daily facts partitioned by day. The fact table is 100 columns wide and we will model two queries that reference 20 of the columns… One that touches every row and one that is date constrained and touches only 14 days of data.
Here are some hardware specs. A server with a single I/O controller can read about 1.5GB/second into the database. With two controllers can read around 2.7GB/sec. Note that these are not the theoretical limits of the hardware but real measurements taken from the current hardware on the market: Dell, HP, and SUN/Oracle.
Now let’s deploy our imaginary warehouse on a strong state of the market multi-core server with, to be conservative, a single controller. This server would scan our fact table in around 222 minutes. Partition elimination would allow the date constrained query to complete in just over 4 minutes. Note that these imaginary queries ignore the effort to join and/or aggregate data. Later I’ll have more to say on this…
If we deploy our warehouse on a shared-nothing cluster with 20 nodes the aggregate I/O bandwidth increases to 30GB/sec and the execution times for our two queries improves to 11 minutes and 12 seconds, respectively. This is the power of parallel I/O.
Now we have to factor in compression. Typical row-based compression yields approximately a 2.5x result… columnar compression varies wildly… But let’s assume 25X in our model. There is a cost to be paid to decompress the data… But since it is paid by everyone and CPU is a relatively inexpensive commodity, we’ll ignore it in our model.
For 2.5X row-based compression our big query now completes in 4.4 minutes and the smaller query completes in 4.8 seconds.
The model is a little more complicated when we throw in columnar compression so let’s consider two columnar models. For an implementation such as Exadata we get the benefit of columnar compression but not the benefit of columnar projection. 25X hybrid columnar compression will execute our two scans in 26 seconds and .5 seconds. Now we are talking! A more complete columnar implementation will only touch the columns required by our query, 20% of the data, providing another 5X improvement. This drops our scan queries to 5.2 seconds and .1 second, respectively. Smoking fast. Note that the more simple columnar compression approach will provide the same fast response when every column is touched and the more complex approach will slow down in that case… so you can make the trade off in your shop as required.
Let me remind you again… This is a full scan of 20TB with no tricks: no indices, no pre-aggregation, no materialized views, no cache and no flash, no pre-sorted zone maps. All that is required is a parallel implementation with partitioning, compression, and a columnar table type… and this implementation works. It is robust.
A note on joins… It is more difficult to model joins… and I’ll attempt a simple model in another post. But you can see that this fast scan approach has solved the costly part of the problem using parallel processing… and you can imagine that a shared-nothing massively parallel approach to joins may hold the key.
