by Angela Guess
David Ramel recently poked fun at the emergence of a new term, NewSQL: “Earlier this month there were several articles published about the term “NewSQL” coined by the 451 Group in regard to a new class of vendors of high-performance, scalable database examined in its new report. The group explains the meaning of the term in a post hawking the report.”
Ramel continues, “I wonder, is this stuff really necessary? Or is it just a backlash that can be viewed as part of a repeating pattern concerning traditional, established technologies, as Andrew J. Brust posited in a thoughtful piece about the NoSQL movement earlier this week.” Brust stated, “So if older technologies are proven technologies, and if they can be repurposed to function like some of the newer ones, what causes such discomfort with them? Is it mere folly of younger developers? Are older developers building up barriers of vocabulary, APIs and accumulated, sometimes seldom used, features in their products, to keep their club an exclusive one?”
Ramel goes on, “The 451 Group noted that… NewSQL is not to be taken too literally: the new thing about the NewSQL vendors is the vendor, not the SQL.’ So, does that help clear things up? Personally, I don’t want a new acronym that describes vendors, not technologies. I hereby officially launch the NoNewSQL movement. It’s all about encouraging enterprises to take advantage of cutting-edge, anti-acronym technologies in order to leverage market trends and forces to enhance business value while increasing ROI.”
photo credit: quinn.anya
While NewSQL might have originally meant “new companies doing SQL” I believe it is more than that. The new companies are addressing challenges that have plagued traditional SQL databases, which are being forced to the forefront via cloud demands.
The cloud’s need for elasticity in the database stack led to NoSQL. Now companies are attempting to do elasticity (and other optimizations) in a SQL database. For example, MySQL Cluster doesn’t support virtualized environments (cloud). Xeround and ScaleDB are doing MySQL clustering in the cloud. Most cloud apps emphasize read performance, Akiban and ScaleDB are doing read optimization for the cloud. There are other cloud-centric issues being addressed, while still maintaining SQL.
I think the idea behind NewSQL is that these companies are stretching SQL into an elastic cloud environment by doing cloud-centric enhancements. I suspect that Oracle and others are making similar enhancements for the cloud, but so far, things like Oracle RAC are not ready for the commodity cloud.
In short, while it might have started out as gratuitous branding of a group of companies, those companies are doing some unique things that are “new” and may just validate the moniker “NewSQL”. Besides NewSQL sounds a lot better than “Commodity Cloud Optimized SQL”
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