Here is one I composed for SAP on the HANA blog about the recent Microsoft SQL Server announcements that is not too obnoxiously pro-HANA. It is more about the data architecture required to handle a world where the client is a mobile device and every query must complete sub-second. This, I believe is where we are headed… taking those BI queries that run in an hour on weak warehouses and improving the response to 10 seconds won’t cut it if your user is on a mobile device… and if the query is customer-facing you will be out of business…
The only way to solve for this is to get lots of silicon between you and your data… and hope that no queries miss the cache… or put it all in-memory.
———
I might have added to the work post that anytime a database vendor pre-announces a product that is due out in 1-2 years, “2014-2015” in this case, it is marketing not architecture… meant to freeze SQL Server customers in place while Microsoft tries to catch up.
Make sure to have a look at the comments… there is a great link to a Microsoft mouthpiece who suggests that I must have no technical background and that I am a liar. Nice.
I would like to recommend you to Barry Devlin’s post here titled “Big Data is Dead… Long Live All Data”. The post ends with the paragraph:
“All this says to me that big data as a technological category is becoming an increasingly meaningless name. Big data is essentially all data. Is there any chance that the marketing folks can hear me?”
I could not agree more. If “big data” is meaningful then, as I have argued, it must be a new thing associated with several newish sources of data that come in large volumes like social media data or sensor data or log data. But the term is so abused that I no longer believe that it is salvageable. Big Data is all data… it is any data…
So of course it is true that business must prepare for it (here), that cloud computing must support it (here), that it is more than just a technology issue (here), that organizations need to be aligned (here)… and so on (note that these are just the four most recent tweets on my feed… I could go on and on). How can this be the driver of new IT spending? How can it be the driver of anything?
The point is that everything that has ever been said about data and data warehousing is being restated as new thinking related to big data. If we measured the information entropy we would find no new information is present.
Big Data is Big Hype… Fuel for Bloggers and Pundits…
Teradata is circulating a document to customers that claims that the numbers SAP has published in its 100TB PoC white paper (here) demonstrates that HANA suffers from scaling issues associated with the NUMA-effect. The document is so annoyingly inaccurate that I have to respond.
NUMA stands for non-uniform-memory-access. This describes an architecture whereby each core in a multi-core system has some very fast local memory accessed directly through a memory bus… but has access to every other core’s local memory through a “remote” access hop over another fast bus. In the case of Intel Xeon servers the other fast bus is know as the QPI bus. “Non-uniform” means that all memory access are not equal… a remote access over the QPI bus is slower than access over the memory bus.
The first mistake in the Teradata document is where they refer to the problem as the “SMP Knee Curve”. SMP stands for symmetric multi-processing… an architecture where multiple cores share the same memory bus. The SMP Knee Curve describes the problem when too many cores are contending for the same bus. HANA is not certified to run on an SMP system. The 100TB PoC described above is not run on an SMP system. When describing issues you might expect Teradata to at least associate the issue with the correct hardware architecture.
The NUMA-effect describes problems scaling processors within a single NUMA node. Those issues can impact the ability to continuously add cores as memory locking issues across the QPI bus slow the system. There are ways to mitigate this problem, though (see here for some examples of how to code around the problem).
Of course HANA, which built an in-memory system with NUMA as a target from the start… has built in these NUMA mitigations. In fact, HANA is designed deeper still using special techniques to keep the processor caches filled and to invoke special-purpose SIMD instructions. HANA is built so close to the hardware that processor cycles that are unused due to cache misses but show up as processor busy are avoided (in other words, HANA will get more work done on a 100% CPU busy system than other software that will show 100% CPU busy). But Teradata chose to ignore this deep integration… or they were unaware of these techniques.
Worse still, the problem Teradata calls out… shouts out… is about scaling over 100 nodes in a shared-nothing configuration. The NUMA-effect has nothing at all to do with scale out across nodes. It is an issue within a single node. For Teradata to claim this is silliness at best. It is especially silly since the shared-nothing architecture upon which HANA is built is the same architecture Teradata uses.
The twists Teradata applies to the numbers are equally absurd… but I’ll stop here and hope that the lack of understanding they exhibit in throwing around terms like “SMP Knee Curve” and “NUMA-effect” will cast enough doubt that the rest of their marketing FUD will be suspect. Their document is surely not about architecture… it is weak marketing… you can see more here…
@henryccook made an interesting point regarding Netezza workload management this morning… He suggested that once a SPU is engaged by a snippet the work must be completed before another snippet can start. To say this another way… a SPU has no OS and cannot save context for a snippet and start another… then return.
If this is true it means that if a long-running snippet starts… a full file scan of a fact table with no use of the zone map… then that snippet will lock out others queries until it completes.
This is not a very fine-grained approach to workload management and we would expect it to cause difficulties.
Can anyone confirm that this is true? It feels right from an architectural perspective…
Here is an attempt to build a Price/Performance model for several data warehouse databases.
Added on February 21, 2013: This attempt is very rough… very crude… and a little too ambitious. Please do not take it too literally. In the real world Greenplum and Teradata will match or exceed the price/performance of Exadata… and the fact that the model does not show this exposes the limitations of the approach… but hopefully it will get you thinking… – Rob
For price I used some $$/Terabyte numbers scattered around the internet. They are not perfect but they are close enough to make the model interesting. I used:
Of these numbers the one that may be the furthest off is the HANA number. This is odd since I work for SAP… but I just could not find a good number so I picked a big number to see how the model came out. Please, for any of these numbers provide a comment and I’ll adjust.
For each product I used the high performance product rather than the product with large capacity disks…
I used latency as a stand-in for performance. This is not perfect either… but it is not too bad. I’ll try again some other time and add data transfer time to the model. Note that I did not try to account for advantages and disadvantages that come from the software… so the latency associated with I/O to spool/work files is not counted… use of indexes and/or column store is not counted… compression is not counted. I’ll account for some of this when I add in transfer times.
I did try to account for cache hits when there is SSD cache in the configuration… but I did not give HANA credit for the work done to get most data from the processor caches instead of from DRAM.
For network latency I just assumed one round trip for each product…
For latencies I used the picture below:
The exception is that for products that use PCIe to access SSDs I cut the latency by 1/3 based on some input from a vendor. I could not find details on the latency for Teradata’s Bynet so I assumed that it is comparable with Infiniband and the newest 10GigE switches.
Here is what I came up with:
Database
Total Latency(ns)
Price/Performance
Delta
HANA
90
1,800
–
HANA (2 nodes)
1190
23,800
13x
Exadata X3
2,054,523
13,559,854
7533x
Teradata
4,121,190
27,199,854
15111x
Greenplum
10,001,190
30,003,570
16669x
I suppose that if a model seems to reflect reality then it is useful?
HANA has the lowest latency because it is in-memory. When there are two nodes a penalty is paid for crossing the network… this makes sense.
Exadata does well because the X3 product has SSD cache and I assumed an 80% hit ratio.
Teradata does a little worse because I assumed a lower hit ratio (they have less SSD per TB of data).
Greenplum does worse as they do all I/O against disks.
Note the penalty paid whenever you have to go to disk.
Let me say again… this model ignores lots of software features that would affect performance… but it is pretty interesting as a start…
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.
“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.
As you may have noticed I’m looking at in-memory databases (IMDB) these days… Here are some quick architectural observations on VMWare‘s SQLFire, Oracle’s Exalytics and TimesTen offerings, and SAP HANA.
It is worth noting up front that I am looking to see how these products might be used to build a generalized data mart or a data warehouse… In other words I am not looking to compare them for special case applications. This is important because each of these products has some extremely cool features that allow them to be applied to application-specific purposes with a narrow scope of data and queries… maybe in a later blog I can try to look at some narrow use-cases.
Further, to make this quick blog tractable I am going to assume that the mart/dw problem to be solved requires more data than can fit on one server node… and I am going to ignore features that let queries access data that resides on disk… in-memory or bust.
Finally I will assume that the SQL dialect supported is sufficient and not drill into details there. I will look at architecture not SQL features…
Simply put I am going to look at a three characteristics:
Will the architecture support ad hoc queries?
Does the architecture support scale-out?
Can we say anything with regards to price/performance expectations?
Exalytics is a smart-aggregate store that sits over an Oracle database to offload aggregate query workload (see my previous post here or the Rittman Mead post here which declares: “Oracle Exalytics uses a specially enhanced version of Oracle TimesTen, Oracle’s in-memory database, to cache commonly used aggregates used in dashboards, analyses and other BI objects.” Exalytics does not support a scale-out shared-nothing architecture but it can scale up by adding nodes with new aggregate data. Queries access data within the aggregate structure and it is not possible to join to data off the Exalytics node… so ad hoc is out. Within these limits, which preclude Exalytics from being considered as a general platform for a mart or warehouse, Exalytics provides dictionary-based compression which should provide around 5X compression to reduce the amount of memory required and reduce the amount of hardware required.
TimesTen can do more. It is a general RDBMS. But it was designed for OLTP. I assume that the reason that Oracle has not rolled it out as a general-purpose data mart or data warehouse has to do with constraints that grow from those OLTP architectural roots. For example, BI queries run longer and require more data than a OLTP query… and even with data in-memory temporary storage is required for each query… and memory utilization is a product of the amount of data required and the amount of time the data has to inhabit memory… so BI queries put far more pressure on an in-memory DBMS. There are techniques to mitigate this… but you have to build the techniques in from the ground up.
I imagine that this is why TimesTen works for Exalytics, though. A OLAP query against a pre-aggregated cube does not graze an entire mart or warehouse. It is contained and “small data” (for my wacky take re: Exalytics and Exadata see here).
TimeTen is not sharded… so scalability is an issue. Oracle gets around this nicely by allowing you to partition data across instances and have the application route queries to the appropriate server. But this approach will not support joins across partitions so it severely limits scalability in a general-purpose mart or warehouse.
SQLFire is a very interesting new product built on top of Gemfire… and therefore mature from the start. SQLFire is more scalable than TimesTen/Exalytics. It supports sharded data in a cluster of servers. But SQLFire has the limitation that it cannot join data across shards (they call them partitions… see here) so it will be hard to support ad hoc queries… They provide the ability to replicate tables to support any sort of joins. If, for example, you replicate small dimension tables to coexist with sharded fact tables all joins are supported. This solution is problematic if you have multiple fact tables which must be joined… and replication of data uses more memory… but SQLFire has the foundation in place to become BI-capable over time.
Performance in an in-memory database comes first and foremost from eliminating disk I/O. All three IMDB product provide this capability. Then performance comes from the efficient use of compression. TimeTen incorporates Oracles dictionary-based “columnar” compression (I so hate this term… it is designed to make people think that Oracle products are sort-of columnar… but so far they are not). Then performance comes from columnar projection… the ability to avoid touching all data in a row to process a query. Neither TimesTen nor SQLFire are columnar databases. Then performance comes from parallel execution. Neither TimesTen nor SQLFire can involve all cores on a single query to my knowledge.
Price comes from compression as well. The more highly compressed the data is the less memory required to store it. Further, if data can be used without decompressing it, then less working memory is required. As noted, TimesTen has a compression capability. SQLFire does not appear to compress data. Neither can use compressed data. Note that 2X compression cuts the amout of memory/hardware required in half or more… 4X cuts it to a quarter… and so on. So this is significant.
Now for some transparency… I started the research for this blog, and composed a 1st draft, last Spring while I was at EMC Greenplum. I am now at SAP working with HANA. So… I will not go into HANA at great length… but I will point out that: HANA fully supports a shared-nothing architetcture… so it is fully scalable; HANA is fully parallel and able to use all cores for each query; HANA fully supports columnar tables so it provides deep compression and the ability to use the compressed data in execution. This is not remarkable as HANA was designed from the bottom up to support both BI and OLTP workloads while TimesTen and SQLFire started from a purely OLTP architectural foundation.
First, you should look at Google’s Spanner paper here… this is the next-gen from Google and once it is embraced by the open source community it will put even more pressure on the big data DBMSs. Also have a look at YARN the next Map/Reduce… more pressure still…
Next… you can imagine that the conventional database folks will quibble a little with my analysis. Lets try to anticipate the push-back:
Hadoop will never be as fast as a commercial DBMS
Maybe not… but if it is close then a little more hardware will make up the difference… and “free” is hard to beat in price/performance.
SSD devices will make a conventional DBMS as fast as in-memory
I do not think so… disk controllers, the overhead of non-memory I/O, and an inability to fully optimize processing for in-memory will make a big difference. I said 50X to be conservative… but it could be 200X… and a 200X performance improvement reduces the memory required to process a query by 200X… so it adds up.
The Price of IMDB will always be prohibitive
Nope. The same memory that is in SSD’s will become available as primary memory soon and the price points for SSD-based and IMDB will converge.
This week an “industry leader” stood in front of a large IT conference and stated that “big data” is any data volume or data complexity that puts you out of your comfort zone. This is not helpful. It makes the definition of big data subjective and psychological. I can see the cartoon now:
Dilbert: I just loaded some new data…
Freud: How does that make you feel, Dilbert?
Industry leaders are trying to get companies to come to grips with the software, hardware, and staffing/expertise issues related to a new opportunity. The operative word is “new”.
Big Data is new… it is NOT any data that makes you feel queasy. People have been uncomfortable with data since computing began.
Big data is about the collection, storage, and analysis of the detailed data that new technology is generating.
The problem is that everyone wants to use the phrase to expound whatever thing they have to sell: every product by every vendor supports big data… and every “industry leader” with every talk needs to include the phrase in the title of their talk and repeat it as many times as possible. So every data warehouse pitch is rehashed as a big data pitch, every data governance, master data management, OLAP, data mining, everything is now big data.
Let’s stop. I Big Data for one, Big Data refuse to Big Data pander to the Big Data boost one gets from Big Data using the phrase to get Big Data attention.
I almost forgot… here is my best previous post on the topic…
HANA vs. Teradata – Part 1: This is a response to some poor thinking posted by Teradata. There is some new content that could be worth a look.
HANA vs. Teradata – Part 2: This continues the response… but it is a rehash of the post here on the rational economics of in-memory databases. Frankly, I had just reread the Teradata posts and wrote this while still annoyed… as a result it is a little flip and despite the junk posted by Teradata I might have shown them a little more respect…
Exalytics vs. Exadata: This post suggests some oddness in Oracle’s positioning of Exalytics and Exadata… maybe worth a look.
