Last year I wrote about NuoDB and about its product. Last week the company introduced a new milestone release. Now with v2.0 the solution is even more seductive and attractive.
NuoDB who?
Well, if you haven’t heard about NuoDB yet, this is probably because you’ve never had to manage performance, scalability or cost issues with your traditional relational SQL DB.
NuoDB is one of those new entrants in the DB market with a product designed from the ground up to work in the cloud and at a web scale. It’s a next generation relational database engine (NewSQL and 100% ACID compliant) with a distributed architecture that makes it very suitable for many traditional workloads that require a pure relational database but also non-traditional workloads that have unpredictable performance and scalability.
The news
First of all, Geo-distribution. Now you can deploy NuoDB machines all around the world and see them as a single large instance? I don’t think this is the right word here (just think about a resilient single image database deployed on different Amazon regions, for example). This is huge, and it has a lot of implications like, for example, in follow-the-sun applications or services.
NuoDB, thanks to this feature, can also be configured to tolerate the fault of an entire region.
The other new features look less relevant to me but important nonetheless. The first ones is that the DB can run a JVM to execute server-side code. This helps developers to put server-side code close to the DB server to speed up certain kinds of operations: very useful for web and mobile apps.
As a direct consequence of the first two new features, the management system has seen a lot of improvements and now it has an interesting “auto-administration” policy based features. Priceless in an environment that can potentially scale up to hundreds (thousands?) of nodes.
The last announced feature is the integration with ZFS (and I don’t think we’re talking about Oracle’s ZFS here!). In this case, ZFS is supported to store the Database files and ZFS snapshots are integrated and used for backup purposes (I’m not sure, but let me guess……. this feature was introduced because of compliance requirements with US standards or laws and not for a technical motive ?). (I think you should add this question mark)
Bottom line
I’m not a DB guy but I really like NuoDB’s cloudish architecture and its features. The product is still downloadable for free (full license is provided and it can be used on a 2-node cluster for testing and small deployments). I think it deserves a look.
