vFabric SQLFire: Better than RDBMS and NoSQL?

“ We believe the ability to do transactions will remain important to app developers.” — Blake Connell, VMware.

vFabric SQLFire beta was recently announced by VMware as part of their Cloud Application Platform, called vFabric 5. I wanted to know more about it. I have therefore interviewed Blake Connell, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, vFabric at VMware.

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Q1. What is vFabric SQLFire beta?

Blake Connell: SQLFire is a memory-optimized distributed database. The beta is available for anyone to download and try while we complete the initial release.

Q2. What are the main technical challenges that vFabric SQLFire is supposed to solve?

Blake Connell: SQLFire addresses speed, scalability and availability. SQLFire Is memory-optimized for maximum speed, this matters because users are becoming more and more demanding about responsiveness of web sites and applications.

SQLFire is designed for horizontal scalability, if you need more performance or need to store more data you simply add more members to the SQLFire distributed system. SQLFire extends SQL with new keywords that describe how tables should be partitioned and replicated, so as you add nodes the system intelligently rebalances itself for high performance, and it’s all completely transparent to the application. This is much more compelling than having to shard your database manually and build shard-awareness into your application.

Finally SQLFire uses a shared-nothing architecture to ensure availability. If a node in the distributed system dies, applications can simply talk to another node. In fact the database drivers shipped with SQLFire will transparently reconnect to a working node without the application needing to do anything, the app doesn’t even have to retry the request. A key compelling characteristics of SQLFire is that it enables developers to work with the well known SQL programming interface making adoption much more seamless and far less disruptive than alternatives.

Q3. When dealing with terabytes to petabytes of data, how do you ensure scalability and performance?

Blake Connell: A big part of the way we address scalability is through horizontal scalability and automatic partitioning / replication of data as I mentioned. But there are some other very important design choices
we’ve made to build a scalable database.
First, we believe the ability to do transactions will remain important to app developers. However we believe that the vast majority of transactions are small both in time required and amount of data affected. We’ve built a transaction system based on these assumptions that completely avoids the need for a centralized coordinator or lock manager. In fact each node can act as its own transaction coordinator, even when the data in the transaction lives in multiple nodes. In this way you get transactions with linear scalability. If you take this along with our partitioning scheme the end result is a relational database that is much more scalable than a traditional RDBMS.

Q4. What are the main results of your performance benchmark for SQLFire?

Blake Connell: In our preliminary performance testing of vFabric SQLFire, the results show the product is able to achieve near linear scalability as the cluster expands, while the CPU utilization remains steady.
In this test, this indicates SQLFire can accommodate even more load without exhausting CPU resources.
In this performance test, two thirds of all queries complete in under 1 ms, roughly 88% complete in under 2 ms, and 97% take under 5 ms which is extremely fast.

Q5. How do you handle structured and unstructured data?

Blake Connell: vFabric SQLFire handles structured data. A related offering, vFabric GemFire handles unstructured data.

Q6. How do you use vFabric SQLFire from Java applications and/ or from ADO.NET?

Blake Connell: We provide JDBC and ADO.NET drivers for you to embed in your application. After that you just use mostly standard SQL. We have DDL extensions, so for example when you create a table you can specify how it should be partitioned, replicated and so forth, but the DML is just standard SQL.
The DDL extensions are all optional and don’t interfere with standard DDL.

Q7. Could you give examples of applications that use SQLFire beta?

Blake Connell: We have a financial services trading application exploring vFabric SQLFire.
The application dramatically increases the speed at which it can take a customer order and send it to a stock exchange while maintaining reliability and security.

Q8. Why using vFabric SQLFire and not of one of the existing NoSQL database or Relatonal Databases?

Blake Connell: vFabric SQLFire offers capabilities not found in traditional RDBMS or NoSQL solutions.
Comparing vFabric SQLFire to the traditional RDBMS:
– Data can be partitioned and/or replicated in memory across a cluster of machines to deliver scale-out benefits and high availability (HA)
– Not constrained by strict adherence to ACID properties. Developers uphold various degrees of ACID properties based on desired levels of data availability, consistency and performance.
– Optimized key-based access

Comparing vFabric SQLFire to NoSQL:
– vFabric SQLFire is focused on data consistency with scale-out and HA, often NoSQL offerings provide eventually consistent data models.
– vFabric SQLFire supports queries and joins with standard SQL syntax.

Q9. How vFabric SQLFire fits into VMware products strategy?

Blake Connell: At VMware, our approach to data is really two-fold:
1. Leverage virtualization to automate database deployment and operations.
2. Provide new approaches to data beyond the traditional one-size fits all database model.

vFabirc SQLFire and vFabric GemFire are key data offerings from VMware that provide alternative data approaches for modern applications. Innovation is occurring at all layers of IT including the database layer. vFabric GemFire is an memory-oriented data fabric. Java developers using the Spring Framework or .NET developers can leverage an API to write applications to vFabric GemFire. vFabric SQLFire enables teams to leverage their skills and investment in SQL knowledge and gain the benefits of distributed, in-memory, shared-nothing architectures.

Our recently released vFabric Data Director leverages vSphere virtualization to provide Database-as-a-Service with centralized back-up, management and governance. This is a huge step forward for both developers looking for fast and simple access to the database resources and for IT teams who need a manageable approach to providing data services.

Q10. What is next in vFabric SQLFire?

Blake Connell: In the first half of 2012 we anticipate enhancing SQLFire to include asynchronous WAN replication. This will let you run a single SQLFire database in multiple datacenters with high performance and low latency.

Related Posts

– MariaDB: the new MySQL? Interview with Michael Monty Widenius.

– On Versant`s technology. Interview with Vishal Bagga.

– Measuring the scalability of SQL and NoSQL systems.

– The evolving market for NoSQL Databases: Interview with James Phillips.

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