The mere fact that he's talking "RAID" instead of SAN speaks volumes. (No pun intended). Any storage engineer worth their salt would be rolling their eyes right now.

The doc you linked to was authored in 2002, about the same time that Oracle's RAC was introduced (late 2001). Some of his citations are from the 80's. THE 80'S!

DB technology has come a LONG way in 8 years, and that paper is no longer valid, unless you're talking about some basic, "minor"/open source db technologies.

If you want to say "open source DB technologies have problems scaling", then go right ahead, and I'll agree.

Just don't mind those of us who continue to build large, scalable systems, using the proper DB technologies, that disprove that "sql doesn't scale" generalization.

Go take a look at Adam Leventhal's work with the Fishworks stuff.

Specifically, go check out the Sun Storage 7310.

It will scale HUGE, and is nowhere near the stupid cost of NetApp or EMC or the other major vendors.

I'd love to see how a bunch of commodity PC's will scale to 100TB, and still be manageable, and have anywhere near the same feature sets.

Again, if you're railing against something as ubiquitous as a SAN, I'm not sure there's anything I can say to change your mind.

Not that I'm really here to change your mind.

Again, the original focus was about SQL not scaling, and you seem to be fixated on the cost of that scaling.

100T is 666 spindles when you go RAID10 with 300G drives (common size in the SAS/FC area).

If you go S-ATA then it'll fit on 200 spindles using 1T drives. I'll stick to the latter variant for now because I'm too lazy to lookup Sun's pricing for SAS spindles, for my comparison below.

So, 200 spindles amounts to roughly 15 hosts (throwing in a few spares for good measure). The whole setup will comfortably fit into one rack, including the FibreChannel machinery and other fluff that you'll likely want.

Thus from the hardware side this is trivially managable, 100T is just not a lot of data nowadays.

On the software side it's up to your creativity and mostly depends on what you actually need to store. I've seen people setup commodity postgres clusters, as well as more fancy things like HDFS, GFS or homegrown storage layers that way. And it worked.

And, regardless of the indeed relatively sane pricing of the Sun (formerly StorageTek) products, the bottomline is what makes the difference.

In figures, for a 100T SAN on the 7310 you're looking at something like $50k for one head, plus around $75k for three trays. We're in the $125k ballpark, hardware-only. And I'm being rather optimistic here: This setup actually holds only 96T and the head is maxed out (3 trays max per controller/head). That means your next upgrade will incur another $25k markup for the next head, good thing you didn't ask for 150T...

Squeezing the same amount of storage into 15 min-spec supermicro pizzaboxes I arrive at roughly $3000 per node, including spindles. A good buyer will get them cheaper. This commodity cluster sets us back only ~$45k in hardware.

That's 1/3 the price of the 7310 solution, being optimistic on the Sun and pessimistic on the commodity side.

That kind of difference makes up for a lot of development effort for the custom solution - most of which is a one time investment anyways and yields better flexibility in the long run. It's also the reason why most of the big boys don't use off-the-shelf SANs for their primary storage.

Allowing for redundancy (RAID 5 on six disks for data, and mirrored the boot drives), we ended up with 6.5TB of storage at about $3500 (that includes i7 proc and 12Gb RAM, and a fancy controller). My labor added some more on top of the $3500.

Mostly, we've been happy. It is more sensitive to heat issues than our HP G5s, and of course, generates more of that heat. If I were to go with any kind of density, I'd need a much more robust cooling solution.

Wrt cooling, for actual servers (i.e. not storage nodes) we've had good success with Sun XFires, the 4100+ range. They are very well built and the markup over the SuperMicro junk is minimal (around 15% last time I checked). Among the niceties is a nice array of hot-swap fans - something that SuperMicro still doesn't seem to deliver in their popular chassis.

I'd also consider the xfires for storage nodes if they'd take 3,5" drives, but afaik all their low-end models only have max eight 2,5" slots. That's just no worthwhile density when compared to the larger SuperMicro tins (which go up to 30x3,5" now I think).

The 2.5 drives are good, and seem to becoming typical, because they run much cooler. We've got some G5s in the same closet, with just as many drives, and they don't run nearly as warm.

But of course, if you're updating the data often - you wouldn't use hadoop (or if you were, you would run HBase or some such on top of it). But there are many use cases where you only write once at that scale. And in those cases, from my perspective - its much nicer to scale on commodity hardware than on big iron.

Open-sourcing is the last step in the technology lifecycle, after the technology has become widely understood and commoditized. When people can still make money off something, they will. What's the incentive for them to give it away?

And if you insist on being cheap, don't be surprised when it turns out that your free database was indeed some cheap stuff which doesn't come fully featured.

> Don't be surprised when it turns out that your free database was indeed some cheap stuff which doesn't come fully featured.

But if being "fully featured" is the goal, then it would be very surprising indeed if what you considered a "competitor" was not, in fact, fully featured. It would not, then, by definition, be a competitor. Or, at least, it would not be worth calling version 1.0 yet.

To refine that: Oracle currently has no FOSS competitors, because there are no FOSS databases that are trying to compete with Oracle. They may be trying to take parts of Oracle's market share, but this is a different thing—optimizing their fit for a situation where Oracle itself is a bad fit.

When I think artifical scarcity, I think something like DeBeers who has warehouses full of diamonds they are hoarding. Whereas with software, there actually is a scarcity of great programmers. There are only so many of them.

With software, you know... it takes time and energy to support it. It costs money to write help documentation, pay for servers where people can download it. All that stuff costs money.

Is open source anti-capitalism?

Is the artificial scarcity coming from the thought that because software is just 1's and 0's that it can be copied almost infinitely? It takes a lot of time and energy to build something that is worth copying. What about all that research and development and risk that was taken to build it. How are those risk takers and R&D staffs going to generate a return on that investment without charging for the product they create?

To put it another way, the "default state" of a naturally scarce commodity, when it is simply produced and then discarded, is still high-value. It can be resold at auction, or traded in a market, and will be fought over even in a state of legal and moral anarchy. The default state of an artificially scarce commodity, however, is value asymptotically approaching zero; without some sort of agency to "prop up" its value, it is worthless, and no secondary party will assign it value unless it is forced to as part of a larger deal (e.g. accepting the legal code to be a citizen of a country.)

Your question ("is open source anti-capitalism?") is just a matter of equivocation. Open Source fits just fine with capitalism, but it is not the capitalism you would first imagine (i.e. that of the US); it is instead "true", or lassiez-faire Capitalism.

In Lassiez-faire Capitalism, there can be no artificially scarce commodities; they are simply a market inefficiency to be eliminated, along with those producing them. A true Capitalism would destroy the value in all "information products"—movies, books, music, games, and, yes, software. In a true Capitalism, value is just "what people are willing to pay"; you don't deserve an ROI just because you worked hard, you only earn money if people feel that your commodity has value to them. In such a market, the only software that could exist is that which was produced for other motives than profit—open source software—or produced as a means to an end of profit, e.g. software that makes a business process more efficient, rather than software that is a product in-and-of-itself.

And now you see why we do not use such a capitalism ;) Though some "creatives" would survive, whether as on-the-whole consultants or by donations from fans (see http://pc.ign.com/articles/967/967564p1.html), the majority would not. In reality, a majority of people desire to keep these creatives around and producing, even at the cost of large market inefficiencies. Realize thus that copyright, more than anything, is a form of socialism, in that it redistributes wealth to those we think deserve a "fair share" for their efforts. Sort of mixes up the arguments most people have on the subject: Open Source is anti-socialist ;)

From that, I gather that we can't use the traditional economics of Supply and Demand to allow a market to decide the value of software. Because the denominator in the equation demand divided by supply is infinite, essentially, it doesn't matter what value demand has in the numerator, because anything divided by infinity is zero.

But my initial impression of this model is that it is doomed to failure. It is doomed to failure, because the artificially scarce product being produced itself requires the consumption of naturally scarce products that are subject to the laws of supply and demand. The developers that produce the software for example need to eat, the need to live in a house, they need to consume energy to drive to work, etc...

So how do we find a balance? Do we find a new way to value software or will software just go away? Will software be relegated to a charitable organization like in the article you linked to, which was quite interesting by the way, so thanks for that. Will the only valuable software be that software which is paid for in advance to be developed at the risk of the consumer? "If you pay me, I'll build it, otherwise, I won't" sort of scenario?

It's like the software only has value if it doesn't exist. If the mechanism to produce the software exists only in the minds of a scarce few who can implement the solution or who have the ability to control access to it, perhaps through SaaS or some other monthly subscription mechanism like WoW or battle.net.

Perhaps we can value software based on how much additional revenue it helps you generate or how much savings it generates through optimizations or automations.

How are we going to strike that balance? Is the gold rush for software over? If there is no carrot, who will run those wheels and invest in our future? Who will take the time to solve the problems before the problems arise? Take Oracle vs. MySQL. Oracle has solved a lot of the problems MySQL has. Over time, as people contribute to the MySQL code base, those problems can be resolved, but consumers of MySQL have to wait for someone else to implement the solution, or they have to pay for a computer programmer to find a work around or implement some solution outside MySQL.

It feels like it will slow us down. Corporations like Oracle and Microsoft will survive a little while longer, but if MySQL ever actually does become as good as Oracle, then people will stop paying for Oracle. If people stop paying for Oracle, Oracle can't hire the best and the brightest.

Well, I appreciate the answer, I do understand better, but that just leaves me with more questions, so I'm thinking out loud.

All I can think of right now is that software will all move to aaS models or be embedded in physical devices so that we can attach a natural scarcity to them. There are only so many factories that can produce microchips. The article you linked to suggested selling plastic figurines with the software, which is a similar idea. It harkens back to the age of dongles.

My former company tried to do this. People balk at this. "Why should I pay when there's 'free?'"

Good customer service and a deep understanding of specific technical issues are not trivially reproducible.

First kernel developers like Linus, Ted, Randy etc aren't really GNU folks.