Cloud (AKA NoSQL) Databases and me

in

I’ve been an RDBMS guy now since about 1988.    Around the time my first son Chris was born, the government department were I worked shifted from an ADABAS/MVS environment to an Oracle/VMS system, and I was dropped headfirst into joy of Oracle 5.1.  Since then I’ve been continuously involved with Oracle development, administration and performance as well in Sybase, MySQL and SQL Server.  So you could say I’m a pretty hard core old-school SQL database guy.

For the longest time, it looked like the RDBMS was here to stay.  But a few years ago,  we noticed signs of new models for databases that were better aligned with modern application architectures,  the massive “big data” demands of Web 2.0 and the increasing disparity between IO and CPU capabilities.   I’ve written and talked  about some of these trends over the past two years and I’ve placed some links to those articles the end of this post. 

What I haven’t been able to talk much about is what we are doing to support these Cloud/NoSQL database at Quest Software.   Quest is  diverse company, with strong offerings in Applications, Virtualization and Windows management,  but we are definitely very dominant in database tools, so you might have been wondering how we planned to move into the next generation of database management tools.  

For the past year or so,  I’ve been directing a team of developers who are building “Toad for Cloud Databases” which will provide data management capabilities for NoSQL/Cloud databases in a familiar TOAD platform.   This Toad will allow developers, DBA and Data analysts to work with data in these databases just as easily as you would with data in an RDBMS.  Even better, you’ll be able to move data between RDBMS and a NoSQL/Cloud database, and issue queries that join data in both databases. 

I can’t say much more about Toad for Cloud Databases in advance of it’s official release later this month.  But I will be starting to blog more frequently on NoSQL topics,  both in this blog and in the Toad for Cloud Databases community site that will be active my the end of June.

In this personal blog,  I’m going to publish some summaries of the things we’ve learned about the various NoSQL/Cloud Databases, especially from the perspective of an RDBMS professional.  I’ll also be posting early versions of articles and posting that will eventually go up on the official Toad for Cloud website.

I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing with Toad for Cloud Databases, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of this stuff with you.  Of course,  we’re still busily working on RDBMS products at Quest and particularly in Melbourne, where we develop SQL Navigator, Spotlight on Oracle, Spotlight on Oracle RAC,Spotlight on MySQL and Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise.  

References

 

As promised, here are links to my previous articles on next generation databases.  Some are a bit dated now, but give you an idea of how the new world has emerged from my (SQL guy) perspective:

Is the next DBMS Revolution Looming? Database Trends and Applications, June 2008

End of the one-size fits all RDBMS? DBTA Database Trends and Applications, July 2008

Map Reduce for Business Intelligence and Analytics DBTA September 2009

What's next for RDBMS? Article published in InfoManagement Direct, May 7, 2009

Hadoop sets its sights on the Enterprise Jan 2010

http://www.slideshare.net/gharriso/next-generation-databases RMOUG presentation Jan 2010