Oracle

PAGE 14
THE EVOLUTION OF
ENTERPRISE CLOUD
TECHNOLOGY

Quest
PAGE 16
TODAY’S DBA AND
THE CHALLENGES OF
MANAGING MULTIPLE
DATABASE ENVIRONMENTS

Aerospike
PAGE 18
FORRESTER SURVEY
HIGHLIGHTS TREND
TOWARDS HYBRID
MEMORY ARCHITECTURE

Pure Storage
PAGE 19
DELIVER BETTER
ORACLE APPLICATION
PERFORMANCE

MariaDB
PAGE 20
INTELLIGENT QUERY
ROUTING FOR SCALABLE,

Database
HIGH-PERFORMANCE
DATA ACCESS

Percona Performance:
NEED for
PAGE 21
THE EVOLVING OPEN

The
SOURCE DATABASE
LANDSCAPE

SPEED & SCALE

Best Practices Series
12 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA

ONE COMPLETE MARKETING PROGRAM

ADVANCING
the Data-Driven
ENTERPRISE
Best Practices Series

These are interesting times for the database world and its participants. Today, multiple forces—big data
consumption and processing to the Internet of Things to real-time analytics to artificial intelligence
and machine learning—are kicking database performance demands into high gear. All these initiatives
mean unprecedented opportunities to advance the evolution of many businesses into data-driven
enterprises, in which decisions at all levels are based on analytics. In this real-time economy, the faster
data analytics can be delivered, the better.

Enterprise business leaders
understand this requirement. A
majority of more than 300 managers
and professionals surveyed, 57%, state
their business leaders now rely heavily
on analytics in their day-to-day decision
making. The research from Unisphere/
Information Today, Inc. also points to
issues with becoming a data-driven
enterprise (“Moving Data at the Speed
of Business 2016 IOUG Survey on Data
Delivery Strategies”). A majority of
survey respondents complain about a
lack of complete information. Plus, most
organizations are not where they want to
be in terms of data delivery.
Leading inhibitors to moving data
faster are database performance issues
(cited by 48%) and network performance
(45%). Data quality also stands out as a
leading roadblock to the faster delivery of
data, cited by 45%. Database performance
remains the greatest issue holding back
the rapid delivery of data to decision
makers, the survey finds. Close to half of
data managers and professionals report
this is the main technical challenge
they face when it comes to moving
toward real-time data delivery. Data
warehouse queries or reports often take
time to produce. Close to one-third of
respondents, 31%, say the time to run
these reports often will take longer than
an hour. In fact, close to one in 10 says it
could take longer than a business day to
run a report.
Organizations are employing a range
of new strategies and approaches to
improve the speed of data delivery and
integration. “Building any real-time
application requires infrastructure and
technologies that accommodate ultra-
fast data capture and processing,” write
Gary Orenstein, Conor Doherty, Mike
Boyarski, and Eric Boutin, in Data
Warehousing in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence. More needs to be done,
because time is of the essence—a global,
hyper-competitive economy demands
nothing less.
Here are key actions that need to be
taken to allow data to move at maximum
velocity to meet the demands of this new
environment:
Ensure that the business drives
data speed requirements.
There is information that is required for
real-time functions, such as machine
learning-driven algorithms, but there is
also information in which latency is not
an issue.
Be able to support both real-time
versus historical information.
There needs to be a distinction drawn.
“Today’s applications thrive using both

real-time and historical data for fast,
accurate insights,” according to Oren-
stein and his co-authors. “Historical data
provides the background for building an
initial algorithm to score real-time data as
it streams into an application.” They add
that “converging traditional online trans-
action processing and online analytical
processing systems requires the ability to
compare real-time data to statistical mod-
els and aggregations of historical data. To
do so, a datastore must accommodate two
types of workloads, without compromis-
ing on latency.”
Exploring artificial intelligence and
machine learning.
These are capabilities that will enable
adjustments and insights that do not
require manual intervention. “To
enable real-time machine learning, you
will need a modern data processing
architecture that takes advantage of
technologies available for ingestion,
analysis, and visualization,” according
to Orenstein and his co-authors. A
McKinsey survey of more than 3,000
organizations finds AI adoption is in its
infancy, with half using three or more
AI technologies within their premises.
Another 41% are piloting AI efforts.
The five categories of AI technology
identified by McKinsey include robotics
and autonomous vehicles, computer
vision, language, virtual agents, and
machine learning.
Install in-memory technologies.
There are a range of in-memory capabil-
ities now available within leading data-
base products, as well as open source
environments such as Apache Spark.
This is a high-performance technology
that is a must for any high-performance
data environment. In-memory databases
and platforms offer an option to rapidly
accelerate data analytics, making it a key
step toward real-time integration and
delivery. About 28% of organizations
now employ in-memory technologies,
and another 23% are piloting or evaluat-
ing the approach. Lack of understanding
may be inhibiting in-memory deploy-
ments, however, and greater industry
education is called for. Close to half of
data managers and professionals, 46%,
admit they have only a basic, limited, or
minimal understanding of the technol-
ogy, and 8% say they have no knowl-
edge at all of in-memory. In-memory is
seen as having a vital role to play in the
success of data-driven enterprises in the
months and years ahead. A majority of
managers and professionals, 52%, regard
in-memory technologies as critical to
their organization’s competitiveness.
Cloud providers offer the scale and
throughput essential for high-performance
data processing that may be too cost-
prohibitive for organizations to build
and maintain on-premises.
Draw on cloud resources.
Cloud providers offer the scale
and throughput essential for high-
performance data processing that may
be too cost-prohibitive for organizations
to build and maintain on-premises.
While many enterprises are turning to
cloud-based data delivery strategies,
it’s going to take some time until
significant workloads will be moved
into these environments, the survey
shows. Currently, 10% of managers
and professionals say they have most of
their data integration workloads being
handled by cloud. Overall, about half of
respondents indicate that there are at least
some workloads moving in this direction.
Turn on data streaming.
Data streaming technologies and services
process information and insights that
move through their systems on a real-
time basis, versus the more traditional
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA 13
approach in which data is stored and
indexed. A survey of 350 enterprises by
Confluent finds a continuing embrace
of Apache Kafka, the open source data
streaming platform. The overwhelming
majority, 86%, indicate the number of
their systems employing Kafka is on the
upswing, and 20% report this growth
was significant. Fifty-two percent report
having at least six systems running
Kafka, up from 41% over the previous
year. Streaming data platforms will play
a key role in processing data flowing
in from sources such as the Internet of
Things and cloud-based sources.
In an environment that demands
real-time insights, enterprise decision
making is weighed down by incomplete
and slow-moving information. Current
approaches may not be enough to
integrate and deliver data within
minutes or seconds, as required in
many of today’s businesses. This is due
to continued inadequate performance,
siloed data, and slow response times
from existing data. This calls for a new
data architecture, and new approaches
to data integration are needed. With
the rise of cloud, big data, and machine
learning, as well as the need to deliver
information at real-time speeds,
organizations are looking at an array of
newer options to support analytics for
their enterprises. n

 —Joe McKendrick
14 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA
The Evolution of Enterprise
Cloud Technology
Cloud technology has changed every-
thing—it has been one of the biggest
transitions in the IT industry over the past
three to four decades. Today’s customers
require greater agility and faster innova-
tion, and need the flexibility to run their
workloads both in the public cloud and on
premises with a predictable and transpar-
ent IT cost structure. As a result, they’re
looking for application-delivery engines
to speed up new application deployments
and provide the services their business
demands to be competitive. These applica-
tions must be developed quickly by small
teams, consume cloud services as building
blocks, release daily, deploy quickly, and
scale across multiple data centers. What’s
more, companies require application
development and data processing that
work behind their corporate firewalls in
order to guarantee security and abide by
data-governance regulations.
CLOUD ADOPTION
RATES ARE HIGH
The cloud has completely transformed
enterprise IT, and as the technology and
services available have matured, adoption
rates have soared.
But how do organizations make the
choice about where to deploy their applica-
tions? Most customers want to combine the
best of cloud and on-premises applications
into a single architecture, and it’s easy to see
why: This gives them maximum flexibility
and leverage with their existing investment,
and their gradual adoption of the cloud.
The cloud is appealing, offering rich data
services, global reach, considerable elasticity,
pure OpEx, and more. But not everything
can run in a public cloud … at least, not
today. One issue customers have had with
public clouds concerns data sovereignty and
compliance. They need to address the issue
that certain workloads and data must reside
within the customer’s country borders, or
behind the firewall within their data center.
SIGNIFICANT BARRIERS REMAIN
While cloud adoption is high, a rela-
tively small percentage of all workloads
are deployed in the cloud. Customers need
to manage workloads seamlessly between
on-premises environments and clouds.
And there are valid reasons why the public
cloud is not always an option:
Data sovereignty
Companies are required to comply with
regulatory, legal, and privacy requirements
and keep sensitive data on premises.
Data control
They must also maintain control of
business-critical systems, and often want a
dedicated infrastructure within their own
data center.
Latency
In addition, they need to connect
with back-end mainframes, databases,
ERPs, and more, with near-zero latency.
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ORACLE TURNS OBSTACLES INTO
OPPORTUNITIES
Oracle Cloud Machine, Oracle Exadata
Cloud Machine, and Oracle Big Data Cloud
Machine are the first solutions provided
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service. Customers can utilize Oracle Cloud
services with Cloud at Customer in the areas
of Infrastructure, Data Management, Big
Data and Analytics, Application Develop-
ment, Enterprise Integration, and Security.
In addition, Oracle provides a complete
Software-as-a-Service portfolio, including
Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Cap-
ital Management, Customer Management,
and Supply Chain Management, for custom-
ers to use with Oracle Cloud at Customer.
Oracle is bringing cloud innovation to
the customer, enabling enterprises to gain
all of the benefits of PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS
in their data centers while maintaining:
• Tight control over data sovereignty and
governance concerns
• Full integration with network security
• Low latency interaction with your other
on-premises applications and data
CLOUD AT CUSTOMER PROVIDES
A STEPPING STONE IN THE
JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD
This is because it allows customers to
unlock the benefits of the cloud faster,
easier, and with less disruption.
Customers can now leverage the latest
innovations and take advantage of the rapid
development that the cloud provides—
increasing their productivity, reducing their
costs, and providing unprecedented flexi-
bility on how they consume cloud services.
Managed by Oracle, with single-vendor
accountability, Oracle Cloud at Customer
delivers increased productivity and reduced
costs, while controlling data sovereignty and
governance concerns. n
ORACLE
www.oracle.com
Sponsored Content OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA 15

PRAGMATYXS MAXIMIZES STAFF PRODUCTIVITY,

ENHANCES DATA SECURITY, AND BOOSTS INNOVATION
BY MOVING DATABASE TO THE CLOUD
Pragmatyxs, Inc. is a boutique consulting and soft- • Delivered efficiency and ensured true 24/7 avail-
ware firm that works with Fortune 500 clients to ensureability of Oracle Database—a constant challenge for
smooth communications between their supply chain, small companies because, while IT teams may be on
quality and business systems, as well as the barcode call 24/7, there is often a time delay in both reaction
and product labels mandated by regulatory bodies. and resolution to any out-of-hours issues
The company has leveraged Oracle technologies since • Leveraged familiar technology by simply mov-
its inception in 1995 and it has been an Oracle partnering its on-premises Oracle Database and Oracle
for the last 15 years. Java solutions to the cloud, eliminating administra-
Pragmatyxs had an on-premises Oracle Database tive costs and accelerating configuration for new
environment and was using Oracle Java for product environments
development. The company decided to migrate these • Launched a label printing cloud service for Prag-
environments to Oracle Platform as a Service (PaaS) matyxs’ partners and remote facilities in less time and
to reduce the amount of time that its staff spent on at a better value with Oracle Database Cloud Service
maintenance and support—ultimately enabling them and Oracle Java Cloud Service
to focus more attention on innovation instead of trou- • Selected Oracle Cloud as a fully managed
bleshooting IT issues. PaaS—a strategic initiative for its business that
CHALLENGES enables it to compete for effectively
• Boost competitive advantage by accelerating time • Improved customer satisfaction by enabling
to market and value of new solutions designed to inte- Pragmatyxs to offer its business-to-business custom-
grate clients’ business and supply chain systems ers uniform, standards-based integration indepen-
• Help clients to maintain and increase success dent of the client form factor (web browser versus
through implementation of accurate product labeling, mobile device, for example) with Oracle Identity
bar coding, and other tracking solutions as mandated Cloud Service
by regulatory bodies • Empowered customers to streamline regulatory
• Increase business productivity by minimizing the compliance and save approximately 20% annually by
necessary resources required to run and maintain the generating product labels more quickly and accurately
company’s onsite-hosted database environment • Delivered multi-tenancy capabilities and
• Ensure Pragmatyxs’ systems run at peak efficiency improved data security, which is critical for Prag-
24/7 to enable it to provide its Fortune 500 clients matyxs’ clients who risk regulatory penalties if labels
with solutions and resources that fit their complex are not accurate
requirements • Achieved a competitive advantage by delivering
new solutions to the market faster and at lower cost
RESULTS thanks to the ability to spin up DevTest environments
• Migrated Pragmatyxs’ on-premises Oracle Data- much more quickly
base and Oracle Java environments to the Oracle Cloud • Laid a foundation to support mobile capabili-
to reduce the amount of time that its IT team spent on ties as well as to take advantage of Oracle Database
maintenance and support, without incurring upfront Cloud Service’s corresponding services, including mes-
hardware costs or having to perform complex tasks such saging, integration service, and document services n
as upgrades and patching—lowering IT costs by 50%
16 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA Sponsored Content

Today’s DBA and the

Challenges of Managing
Multiple Database Environments
Today, DBAs are tasked not only with
administering more and more databases,
but also with exploring and deploying a
much broader variety of databases. After
all, adding platforms helps organizations
avoid over-exposure to the contract
negotiation leverage of any single vendor.
On top of that, DBAs themselves often
push for adding in open-source solutions,
many of which are fully mature and offer
the transparency, scalability, flexibility and
support that both DBAs and enterprises
are looking for.
However, this strategy comes at a price:
Large, heterogeneous environments can
be a serious challenge to manage. If you’re
a DBA, database performance is one of
your top responsibilities, and system
uptime is likely the key metric by which
you are measured. How can you ensure
high performance and availability in the
cross-platform database environment
you want to implement or are already
overseeing?
You don’t have time to constantly
learn new native or third-party database
monitoring tool sets, let alone juggle
multiple tools on a daily basis, hoping you
can keep them straight and not make any into a single comprehensive view so you 4 Resolve performance issues across
errors. Moreover, multiple separate tools can ensure consistently high database database platforms by determining
simply can’t give you the global view you performance and availability. With a low your most critical problems and taking
need to quickly troubleshoot problems, overhead agentless architecture, you’ll immediate action.
prioritize issues and meet your service- get a wealth of information without all 4 With one click, limit your view to just
level agreements (SLAs). the hassle and expense of native tools one database platform or a particular
You can simplify database performance and point solutions, which means you database server. Or set up groups of
monitoring and management—even as spend less time fighting database fires and database servers and click to view just
your database environment becomes can implement a proactive approach to your production servers.
increasingly complex—with Quest improving the health and performance of 4 Quickly drill down to investigate
Foglight for Databases. your database environments. platform-specific database health or
The Foglight solution is built to Unlike database-specific point solu- performance issues—both real-time
support both small and large enterprise tions, Foglight for Databases delivers and historical—in detail.
environments with thousands of a coherent, global view of your entire 4 Get integrated management and
databases. It standardizes performance database environment, with consistent, performance views that enable you
monitoring and diagnostics across a powerful functionality. No matter what to understand database health and
broad range of platforms, including combination of supported databases you’re activity.
Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, SAP ASE, managing, and whether your databases are 4 Receive alerts about deviations from
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and deployed on premise or in the cloud, you’ll normal activity during different time
Cassandra, consolidating information get all of the following capabilities: periods and track performance with
 The average enterprise has 100-500 database instances running At 60% of enterprises, the number of database
today across multiple database platforms instances each DBA is responsible for managing
is growing in size and variety
INSTANCE
System Global Area (SGA)
SharedPool Large Pool

x
Library Cache
Shared SQL Area Private
SQL Area
SELECT * FROM (Shared
employees Server Only)

Data Server Other Reserved Response Request

Dictionary Result Pool Queue Queue
Cache Cache

Database
Buffer Cache Redo
Fixed
SGA
Java
Pool
Streams
ms
Pool
or
Log INSTANCE
Buffer INSTANCE

INSTANCE INSTANCE

INSTANCE
PMON SMON DBWn LGWR CKPT Others

Background Processes

At 60% of enterprises, the size of DBA teams

is not growing

DATABASE

DBA TEAM
Data files Control files Online redo log files

automatic detection and calculation of 4 View wait-event data down to the solution that grows with your database
normal ranges for all metrics. statement level to rapidly resolve environment. Simply start with the car-
4 Resolve performance issues by easily resource-related performance tridges you need now, and add new ones
navigating through diagnostics and problems. as your environment grows and changes.
alarm data from any drill-down screen. 4 Stay alerted to critical issues with Each Foglight cartridge includes
4 Use the data collected by Foglight to out-of-the-box alarms, including platform-specific functionality along with
develop customized views, reports, baseline deviation alarms, which built-in expertise that dramatically short-
and alarms. provide detailed information for ens the learning curve, so you’ll be quickly
4 Drill into the data cube to easily troubleshooting. Easily add alarms, able to quickly ensure the same high
investigate database workload. View including alarms based on your own performance and availability for your new
every dimension of your data, includ- scripts. Search for past solutions, set up databases using the same familiar tool and
ing users, programs, SQL and sessions blackouts, and manage and annotate workflows, without having to invest time
(available for Oracle and SQL Server). your alarms. and money learning all the minutia associ-
4 Review and investigate changes to serv- 4 Integrate your other end-to-end enter- ated with each new database technology. n
ers, instances, databases and schema, as prise monitors seamlessly.
well as application SQL degradations. Foglight for Database offers the broad WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Use customizable alerts to keep abreast coverage you need, with built-in plat- www.quest.com/foglight
of critical changes. form-specific expertise. It’s a modular -for-cross-platform-databases
18 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA
Forrester Survey Highlights
Trend Towards Hybrid
Memory Architecture
Digital Transformation initiatives are
well underway at global enterprises in
industries such as Financial Services, Telco,
Retail, and Manufacturing. Companies are
deploying real-time Systems of Engagement
(SoE) applications to better serve their
customers, employees and partners and
to increase their competitive advantage.
Examples of SoE applications include stock
trading and fraud and risk assessment in
Financial Services, optimizing network
resources and improving the customer
experience in Telco, hyper-personalization
and ad targeting in Retail, and IoT
device monitoring and management in
Manufacturing.
The ability to perform analytics in
real-time on transactional data is critical.
SoE applications require a database
architecture that can analyze billions of
records across millions of transactions
per second and return decisions within
milliseconds. But traditional database
platforms are not capable of handling
these new requirements. An RDBMS or
first generation NoSQL database with
an external caching layer often cannot
meet SLA requirements for speed, uptime
and consistency. In-memory databases,
which store data in DRAM, are a better
solution but suffer from performance and
reliability issues.
Hybrid Memory Databases move
beyond In-memory to meet the
requirements of real-time SoE applications.
According to Forrester Research, “Hybrid
memory architecture is a new
approach that leverages both volatile
memory (DRAM) and non-volatile
memory such as SSD and flash to
deliver consistent, trusted, reliable and
low latency access to support existing
and new generations of transactional,
operational, and analytical
applications. Implementing this type
of architecture allows organizations
to move from a two-tier in-memory
architecture to a single tier structure
that simplifies the movement and storage
of data without requiring a caching layer.
Early-adopters are seeing several benefits
to their business like a lower cost of
ownership, huge reductions in their server
footprint, simplified administration and
improved scalability.”
Aerospike recently commissioned
Forrester Consulting to conduct a study
surveying North American organizations
to determine the challenges they face with
their current in-memory architecture and to
evaluate the awareness and implementation
of hybrid memory architecture. Here are the
key findings and recommendations from
the survey study titled Hybrid Memory
Architecture Drives Real-Time Systems
of Engagement: Replace Traditional
In-Memory Architectures To Better Win,
Serve, And Retain Customers.
KEY FINDINGS
• Challenges with current in-memory
architectures include high cost of
ownership, issues with reliability and
uptime, and an increasing number of
databases.
• Many companies are planning to
expand their memory-based database
architecture investments to support
growing business needs. Companies
are planning to increase their spending
on memory architectures as part of
their digital transformation initiatives
over the next 1-2 years. Sixty-five
percent of decision-makers plan to
increase spending 1-15% and 32%
Sponsored Content
plan to spend greater than 16% over
the next year or two.
• Hybrid memory architectures
deliver better consistency, reliability
and low-latency access to active data.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
• Focus on hybrid memory architecture
that delivers better consistency,
reliability, performance and scale.
Hybrid Memory Architecture is ideal
for applications that need extreme low-
latency access to critical data. Use these
solutions to scale-out horizontally to
leverage low-cost servers yet deliver the
performance and scale needed.
• Look for hybrid memory solutions that
meet your requirements for uptime,
data consistency, reliability, performance
and that have a lower TCO.
• Use hybrid memory solutions to
support multiple workloads such as
operational and analytical.
ABOUT AEROSPIKE
Aerospike is the only database that
reliably handles the demands of SoE
applications. Aerospike’s Hybrid Memory
Architecture combines solid-state drives
(SSD) and DRAM to achieve the sustained
performance that SoEs require—with a
significantly smaller footprint. Aerospike’s
Smart Client™ technology automatically
handles complex database processes so
developers and operations staff can focus
on the business, not administration.
The Aerospike database is successfully
meeting the challenges of the
most demanding digital economy
players in Financial Services,
Telecommunications, Retail,
Manufacturing, Ad Tech,
eCommerce, Gaming, Oil and
Gas, Media and Publishing. n
For more information about
AEROSPIKE and to download
the survey study, please visit
www.aerospike.com
Sponsored Content
Every time you roll out new code,
you’re rolling the dice. Good code?
Bad code? Will it work properly? If
you’re like many application owners,
you won’t really know how your code
will perform until it’s fully deployed
in a production environment. Sure,
your QA team tested the code. But did
they do it in a full-scale production
environment?
BAD CODE: SLOW APPS
It turns out that sub-optimal
application code causes some 70-90%
of application performance issues,
according to experts. This spawns
cascading problems in production
systems, including slow response times
for users, declining satisfaction, and
lower usage rates. And, while your dev,
database, and infrastructure teams
are fixing the problems, they’re not
providing new, expanded, or enhanced
application capabilities to grow and
improve your company’s business.
Thus, SLAs, agility, and responsiveness
suffer.
Expert Oracle DBAs can attest
that many application problems
would be solved by testing and QAing
new application code using actual
production workload and hardware.
Testing code with a production
workload identifies big problems
so that programming can be fixed
before deployment. The problem is
that it takes time to procure, set up,
and configure databases and storage
hardware, and then load all of that
production data into test databases.
But, what if your team could test
with production data at scale—without
breaking the bank? You’d deliver better
applications with fewer performance
issues. And you’d approach each
moment of truth with greater
confidence in the result.
Deliver Better
Oracle Application
Performance
YOU CAN DO IT—AND THE
ANSWER STARTS WITH FLASH
STORAGE. YES, FLASH STORAGE.
Application owners can now
deploy nearly cost-free real-world
Oracle database test & QA database
environments for their developers by
deploying applications on the Pure
Storage FlashArray. This prevents
problems from entering production
environments and unleashes sustainable
business agility.
Flash storage—solid state hard drives
similar to those in smartphones—
delivers blazing fast response times
that improve database performance
with, for example, a 10x reduction in
database backup/recovery time and a
3x improvement in the performance of
transactional and business intelligence
applications.
Over the last several years, server
and networking equipment have
advanced at a rapid pace, but traditional
spinning disk storage has not kept up.
Your application may have all of the
server capacity and network bandwidth
it needs, but still lack adequate
storage horsepower, creating a major
bottleneck.
When you replace spinning disks
with flash arrays with advanced
capabilities too, you can actually create
copies of the production database in
a fraction of the time. Advanced flash
arrays not only speed up applications
with faster and more resilient storage,
they also give companies the ability
to create copies of the production
database—without time-consuming
backup/restores and without slowing
down production systems.
For example, advanced de-dupe and
compression capabilities from Pure
Storage further squeeze compressed
data by 2:1 and uncompressed databases
by a factor of 4-5:1. Even greater
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA 19
reductions (20:1) are produced in
virtualized desktop environments,
allowing even more data on less storage
hardware. Incremental backups are
quick and complete, taking less storage
capacity to create and store.
A WINNING COMBINATION
The combination of advanced
software deduplication and
compression of the advanced flash
storage array frees up significant
storage capacity. This extra capacity
allows for production workload capable
development and QA environments—
without the hardware overhead that was
previously a requirement.
In this scenario, teams eliminate the
need to procure additional hardware
budget for testing environments. They
also dramatically reduce the staff time
required to clone and load production data
workloads; this now takes only minutes
instead of days with advanced arrays.
Your dev and QA teams can test
application code in accurate, simulated
production environments. They’ll be
able to proactively identify and fix load-
related problems—before code goes into
production. With accurate load-testing,
you’ll deliver applications that are more
stable, scalable, and robust.
Now, the moment of truth has come
and gone. Your new application is up
and running. Users are, well, using the
application. Business executives are
pleased. Your infrastructure team is
relieved. And you and your team are
proud.
YOU DID IT!
Now you’re ready to work on the
next application so you can move your
business forward. Today has been a
great day. n
PURE STORAGE
www.purestorage.com
20 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA
In the digital era, where rising user
experience expectations have to be
met while at the same time protecting
personal data, database proxies have
become a critical component of
modern data infrastructure.
A database proxy, deployed
between applications and databases,
provides two critical capabilities:
query routing and query/response
filtering. Because the database proxy
is responsible for routing queries, the
underlying database infrastrastructure
can be changed without modifying
applications—enabling database
administrators to add/remove database
servers, perform database upgrades
and failover/switchover databases on
demand.
In addition, the database proxy
is in a position to intercept both
queries and query results, enabling the
database proxy to prevent queries from
reaching the database, or to modify the
results before they are returned to the
application. For example, when acting
as a firewall, the database proxy can
block queries by malicious attackers
attempting to corrupt or delete data.
In the case of personal data (e.g., a
Social Security number or credit card
number), the database proxy can
use pseudonymization to modify the
results before they are returned to the
application.
While query routing and query/
result filtering provide a number of
benefits when it comes to managing
databases and protecting personal
data, performance and scalability are
required to meet rising user experience
expectations. With intelligent routing,
a database proxy can not only use
multiple database servers to scale reads
and/or writes, it can route reads and
writes to different database servers.
This enables the database proxy to
route writes to one database server and
Intelligent Query Routing
For Scalable, High-
Performance Data Access
load balance reads, with or without
weighting, to other database servers.
With the use of connection pooling,
persistent connections and caching,
a database proxy can further improve
performance, thereby reducing the
cost associated with creating database
connections and reducing the database
workload by returning cached results
without having to query the database.
MariaDB MaxScale, an advanced
database proxy, is built on a
multi-threaded architecture using
asynchronous I/O and epoll to scale
on modern, multi-core processors.
By using threads to manage client
and database connections, MariaDB
MaxScale can support thousands
of connections, and as the number
of processor cores increases, more
applications with higher query
throughput and lower query latency.
MariaDB MaxScale uses automatic
topology detection and dynamic
configuration to support intelligent
routing. In a master/slave database
deployment, it can identify which
database is the master (where to
route writes) and which databases
are the slaves (where to route reads).
In a multi-master deployment with
clustering, it can automatically
designate one of the database servers to
be the master (to avoid conflicts) while
routing reads to the other database
servers. In addition, it can detect
when a database server has failed and
optionally execute a script to failover
to a different database server. Further,
MariaDB MaxScale supports schema-
based sharding, routing queries to
different database servers based on the
schema being queried.
MariaDB MaxScale is engineered
for both performance and extensibility,
using plugins and protocols to provide
extended capabilities. The firewall
plugin can be enabled to filter queries
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based on rules and syntax—type, table,
column, time and frequency—from
being executed while the data masking
plugin can be enabled to replace the
values of specific column values with
generic values. For example, replacing
the value of a Social Security number
column with XXX-XX-XXXX. The
result limiting and firewall plugins can
be used to prevent denial of service
and distributed denial of service
attacks as well, limiting the number of
connections, query rate and result size
to prevent the database and/or network
from being overwhelmed.
In addition, the change-data-capture
plugin can stream database events as
AVRO objects or JSON documents to
external systems (e.g., Apache Kafka)
by tapping into the replication process
in MariaDB Server.
In a recent benchmark, using
sysbench, MariaDB MaxScale proxied
over 300,000 queries per second for
1,024 client connections on a 16-core
processor—nearly as fast as direct
database access. With query caching
enabled, it processed 900,000 queries
per second—about three times faster
than querying the database.
MariaDB MaxScale is the world’s
most advanced database proxy, capable
of providing the performance and scale
required to meet user expectations
while at the same time providing
the security capabilities necessary to
protect personal data and prevent data
breaches—and the revenue/reputation
costs associated with them. MariaDB
MaxScale is part of MariaDB TX, an
enterprise database solution built on
MariaDB Server, and is compatible with
Oracle MySQL. n
Learn more about
MARIADB MAXSCALE
https://mariadb.com/products
/technology/maxscale
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Databases are moving toward open source
deployments that require less maintenance
to power the applications and websites that
enterprises use every day. Businesses need
to be mobile and flexible when it comes to
their application and web use—and this
mobility must be mirrored in their database
environments.
The following are important developing
areas in the database landscape:
THE “CLOUD”
Cloud-based solutions are growing
and encompassing more and more of the
database landscape. The cloud reduces the
management and maintenance overhead
for companies looking to control costs. But
this comes with concerns such as over- and
under-provisioning, getting proper support,
and ballooning costs. It is still important
to understand what is going on with your
database architecture and environment.
CONTAINERIZATION
Containers are lightweight alternatives
to full machine virtualization. This pro-
vides many of the same benefits of virtual
machines, and the application can be run
on any physical machine without worrying
about dependencies.
While Docker was the first big player, it
isn’t the only container option: CoreOS’s
Rocket, LXC, Project Atomic, and others
exist. Ubuntu has announced the LXD
container engine for its version of Linux,
and Windows Server has Drawbridge and
Spoon. Kubernetes is an open source con-
tainer cluster manager that can automate
deployment, scaling, and operations of
application containers across clusters of
hosts.
SECURITY AND ENCRYPTION
With more and more systems, applica-
tions, and processes going online for remote
access, there is more data that is exposed
to breaches. Many industries—health-
care, financial services, government, and
insurance—have mandated compliance
The Evolving
Open Source
Database Landscape
regulations. Many security officers equate
compliance with security. This isn’t true,
and compliance doesn’t prevent data theft.
The rules for (and problems with) good
security haven’t changed. Companies must
continue to ensure seamless encryption
(both in-transit and at rest) with as little
overhead as possible.
EFFICIENCY
Two of the ways to achieve database
efficiency are speed and compression. As
per-gigabit prices drop compared to spin-
ning drives, SSDs are becoming the go-to
hardware of choice for speed.
For compression, the interplay between
algorithm and block size continues to
improve—as we’ve seen this year with
Snappy, Zstandard, and LZMA.
AUTOMATION
Automation features ensure you can
scale performance in the event of high user
or query concurrency, optimize perfor-
mance for dashboarding and reporting,
implement data analytics, distribute data
and manage metadata and implement high
availability and disaster recovery.
Many fully synchronous replication
solutions are out there already (Percona
XtraDB Cluster and MySQL Group Replica-
tion), but look for more in the semi-syn-
chronous replication area via tools such as
Orchestrator, MHA, and others.
SCHEMA CHANGE AUTOMATION
Applications that rely on unknown or
undocumented schema changes offer a rec-
ipe for disaster. They lead to rushed fixes for
untested or unexpected workloads. Instead,
you can use environmental intelligence
to understand how changes will impact
applications in production or any other
environment.
Many companies are creating methods
of automatically altering the schema via
scripts. These approaches include oak-on-
line-alter, pt-online-schema-change, and
now gh-ost.
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 | DBTA 21
POLYGLOT ARCHITECTURES
“Polyglot persistence” simply means
using multiple data storage technologies
working together. The cost, of course, is
environmental complexity. But the benefits
of flexibility, mobility, and adaptability can
be worth it. And, having the ability to both
quickly scale up and out by employing both
NoSQL and relational databases can be
advantageous.
Polyglot persistence will become much
more common. Organizations can no lon-
ger be only a MySQL or MongoDB shop.
ACCESS CONVERGENCE
The use of multiple technologies in a
database environment increases database
access convergence: the ability of databases
to serve and use data stored in a foreign
format (for example, moving relational data
into a NoSQL environment, and vice versa).
The MySQL world is seeing an increase
in NoSQL access patterns via mysqlsh (the
mysql shell), and formats such as GeoJSON.
The new MySQL document store feature
also looks promising. PostgreSQL uses
JSON functions and foreign data wrappers.
The Hadoop world is, of course, focused on
getting more SQL on top, via Spark.
MONITORING
Database customers will look for
monitoring tools that can oversee and
provide insight into multiple technologies.
With polyglot persistence, the movement
to the cloud, access convergence, and the
overall increase in database options that can
be used in a single environment, a useful
monitoring tool looks at the status and per-
formance of relational, NoSQL, and other
databases simply and easily.
The open source database landscape is
trending toward more flexibility, with varied
technologies all working together to achieve
specific goals. With this agility comes a need
to easily manage, monitor, and troubleshoot
the database environment. n