Comments on: The Silliness of NewSQL http://www.dataversity.net/the-silliness-of-newsql/ Mon, 20 May 2013 16:53:38 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Mike http://www.dataversity.net/the-silliness-of-newsql/#comment-558 Mike Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:08:21 +0000 http://www.dataversity.net/?p=3240#comment-558 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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