Oh yes...mainframes that have been developed over decades catering specifically to enterprise needs are far less superior than what a group of 20-something engineers at a social media company came up with.

Excuse the sarcasm, there are certainly places where distributed in-memory data stores on commodity hardware are a fine solution. That does not mean its taking over mainframe computing because that solves a completely different class of problems.

Mainframes are more expensive per-CPU-unit or per-IOPS. Google has shown that, with the right distributed software, a cluster of cheap machines can be more reliable because you avoid putting all your eggs in the mainframe basket. (The tradeoff is that your software is more complicated and likely introduces new failure scenarios).

So, although mainframes are indeed optimal for today's database, the NewSQL hypothesis is that different database software will be able to run on multiple machines, and so the mainframe will no longer be the optimal solution. This (hypothesized) database would run on a cluster of commodity machines, and should therefore be cheaper and hopefully more reliable. Moreover, just as Google's clusters beat Altavista's mainframe approach, a clustered database should scale to much bigger workloads than the biggest mainframe.

Of course, this relies on a new breed of database.

'Google has shown that, with the right distributed software, a cluster of cheap machines can be more reliable because you avoid putting all your eggs in the mainframe basket.'

'Moreover, just as Google's clusters beat Altavista's mainframe approach, a clustered database should scale to much bigger workloads than the biggest mainframe.'

My one comment on those points is that distributed computing solved Google's problem, and of course applies to what many software companies are trying to do (amazon, yahoo, etc.) But do they have an answer for the set of problems where 100% ACID compliance and high-availability is a requirement?

The ATM machines people use every day to exchange money are not fully ACID compliant, and they do not use "transactions". It's a calculated choice on the design of the system to account for the guarantees in different ways and balance discrepancies that occur after the fact.

If you need full ACID compliance and need to operate at "Google scale", you reorganize the problem so that you don't need the compliance.

The CAP conjecture has certainly been a major barrier to progress in this area ;-)

The columnar store I use are in the $10K/TB range running on $10-25K servers.

I think Oracle is going to have trouble with this space.

If you can afford it, Microsoft's new PDW looks like a much richer functionality columnar store.

Howdy. I like how you hold no punches on your blog but normally you are good about backing them up with data. I hope to meet you some day.

The precise quote from my client that uses TeraData is "I.T. charges me $1M for each TB I use". I know that's very different from what it costs the business but it is still a very damning number. That's basically a fully loaded cost to an end business unit.

If costs are CLOSE to being that high, then data volumes are a very poor metric for cost allocation. 2+ people per terabyte are being counted in, so either there are a huge number of tables, or they're including BI developers, or something.

E.g., doubling the size of every table, if nothing else changed, might only take those costs up 10%, give or take a factor of 2.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/timesten/overview...

And remember that you go with Oracle for more than just technology.

Can you explain this? In my experience, you used to go with Oracle for technology but that was about 15 years ago.

In the heath care industry, it doesn't matter what you make, it doesn't matter how good it is, and it doesn't matter how proven it is.

If you don't say the word "Oracle", you don't get the contract.

Talk to Judy at Epic and you get a different opinion. Actually, talk to almost anybody I've ever met in my 10 years in healthcare and you'd get a different opinion.

[1] http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive-Octal.asp

And $1/Gb is coming soon

If you're just starting out, however, Oracle is rarely close to being cost-effective.