OK, you're either going to be fascinated by what I'm about to tell you, or you're going to think, "Wow, Christopher has one weird hobby."
Next weekend, you might be bowling, watching football or taking your lady dancing, I'll be dressed up in a tunic, like the ones you see in movies about Vikings, watching my friends in their armor hitting each other with swords made from rattan (you know, like old style lawn furniture)
So by now I’m sure those of you following us know about our relentless passion for eliminating costly joins between tables. The point of the technology we’re developing at Akiban is to make SQL so powerful it merges with documents and makes any complex query execution – well – simple.
Akiban is starting a new series where the development team will be reviewing a query that is causing relational databases bottlenecks in performance. These are painful real world queries, that we have found while working with design partners, which are bringing company applications to their knees. Each episode will show how to overcome database performance issues and Scalability, without any changes to your application.
Rowing is sometimes defined as the art of going nowhere backwards as fast as you can in a boat. As a master (meaning “old”) rower, I spend a lot of time going nowhere backwards in a boat. The “fast” part is relative, but I do compete with my team in events as far away as Oak Ridge and Los Angeles and sometimes we win. My Akiban colleagues can confirm that one thing a rower likes to do more than rowing is talking about it.
Akiban Technologies is planning to attend DrupalCon 2012 in Denver on March 20 in force. The timing works well, as we expect to have our first product announced by then and we also expect to demonstrate Drupal 7 ported to work natively on the open source version of Akiban Server.
Akiban is comprised of a dynamic mix of developers, DBAs and people who have built careers on databases and database technology. We can all share a laugh when we share anectdotes about clashes between developers and DBAs, but it's a very real and common friction point in many organizations.
Akiban Server is currently targeted to be integrated into existing MySQL implementations through standard replication. At a high-level, the topology is straightforward:
In this brief 3 minute clip, Ori covers deploying Akiban Server and the decision process behind assigning the table-grouping workload.
Akiban has been traveling quite a bit lately, talking to people about table-grouping and the transformational read performance improvements it can bring.
Ori was recently interviewed by O'Reilly's Tim O'Brien on Akiban and the technology we are bringing to market. In this brief 5 minute video, Ori discusses the inspiration behind table-grouping.
The shortest path
The unique thing that Akiban does is to store the rows of grouped tables together, eliminating the costs associated with the most common joins. Early on, the question was how to get a database system that implemented this idea into the hands of as many users as possible, as quickly as possible.
It's funny how being forced to write about something forces you to actually see it. When I was asked to write about our new Jenia release just a couple weeks go, I procrastinated a bit, in part because it was hard to remember, given our pace, exactly what was in this release. Now that I've finally gotten around to it, we're already pushing toward our next release, Puck.
