An Ending and a Beginning: VMware Has Acquired Continuent

As of today, Continuent is part of VMware. We are absolutely over the moon about it.

You can read more about the news on the VMware vCloud blog by Ajay Patel, our new boss. There’s also an official post on our Continuent company blog. In a nutshell the Continuent team is joining the VMware Cloud Services Division. We will continue to improve, sell, and support our Tungsten products and work on innovative integration into VMware’s product line.

So why do I feel exhilarated about joining VMware? There are three reasons. 

1.     Continuent is joining a world-class company that is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Even better, VMware understands the value of data to businesses. They share our vision of managing an integrated fabric of standard DBMS platforms, both in public clouds as well as in local data centers. It is a great home to advance our work for many years to come.

2.     We can continue to support our existing users and make Tungsten even better. I know many of you have made big decisions to adopt Continuent technology that would affect your careers if they turned out badly. We now have more resources and a mandate to grow our product line. We will be able to uphold our commitments to you and your businesses.

3.     It’s a great outcome for our team, which has worked for many years to make Continuent Tungsten technology successful. This includes our investors at Aura in Helsinki, who have been dogged in their support throughout our journey.

Speaking of the Continuent team…I am so proud of what all of you have achieved. Today we are starting a new chapter in our work together. See you at VMware!

Exorcising the CAP Demon

Computer science is like an enormous tool box you can rummage through whenever you have a problem to solve. Most of the tools are sturdy and practical, like algorithms for B-trees. Some are also elegant, like consistent hashing in Dynamo. Finally there are some tools that you never quite figure out even after years of reflection. That piece of steel you are looking at could be Excalibur. Or it could be a rusty knife.

The CAP theorem falls into the last category, at least for me.  It was a major topic in the blogosphere a few years ago and Google Trends shows steadily increasing interest in the term since 2010.  It's not my goal to explain CAP fully--a good informal description is here or you can just read the proof yourself.  Instead I would like to talk about how I understand and use the CAP theorem today as well as how that understanding might evolve in the future.

In a nutshell CAP puts a limit on how distributed database systems trade off data consistency and system availability.   Eric Brewer originated the theorem as a conjecture in the late 1990s. Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch supplied a proof of the conjecture in 2002.  Brewer described it as follows in 2012:

The CAP theorem states that any networked shared-data system can have at most two of three desirable properties:

• consistency (C) equivalent to having a single up-to-date copy of the data;

• high availability (A) of that data (for updates); and

• tolerance to network partitions (P).

My initial problem in understanding CAP was relating the proof to what happens in the real world, which is not especially easy. Network partitions are an example.  Here's how the Gilbert/Lynch proof defines them in Section 2.3.

When a network is partitioned, all messages sent from nodes in one component of the partition to nodes in another component are lost. (And any pattern of message loss can be modeled as a temporary partition separating the communicating nodes at the exact instant the message is lost.)

So does this include an asymmetric communication failure? That's where a process on one host can see and send messages to a process on another host but the reverse is not true. This happens all the time in group communications for reasons that range from application software bugs to bad cabling and everything in between. Do you model the asymmetry as a sequence of temporary partitions? It's of course possible. But it feels a bit like using Ptolemaic astronomy with epicycles. 

Other people have made similar observations. Eric Brewer even wrote about the "nuances" of partitions in his 2012 retrospective. There are analogous problems with the other terms. There was enough public disagreement their meaning that I wrote a "disproof" of CAP a few years back as an April Fools Day joke. It depended on not being able to distinguish CA and CP choices in real systems. 

That confusion is not a problem with the CAP theorem itself. Nobody has seriously challenged the proof. Instead, it's a matter of what logicians refer to as interpretation, which links a logical model to some domain of discourse so that you can draw valid conclusions about that domain. If you want to reason about real-world systems using the CAP theorem you must first ensure your systems really match the model. Otherwise it's like using a map of Oregon to drive between New York and Boston.  The core difficulty is that the CAP theorem proof assumes binary properties whereas in reality properties like availability operate on a sliding scale. 

My other issue with CAP evaluation is what you might call a suitability problem. There are a lot of issues with operating distributed systems, and the 3-way trade-off is irrelevant to many of them. For instance, what happens when the network is behaving and you don't have to make pesky choices between availability and consistency? Let's look at some examples. 

CAP defines consistency as linearizability, which means that transactions on different replicas look as if they all happened at once in a single place in a single unbroken series. Imagine driving around to different automated teller machines at a bank and making changes to your account balance or checking it. No matter which teller machine you visit next, it knows exactly what happened before and has the right balance amount. Or imagine a shopping cart on a website like Zappos.com. No matter how you jump around the website to select clothing or even if you fold up your laptop and fly to Paris, the items in your shopping care remain consistent without duplicate or missing selections. 

You might say, well, not all systems work that way.  You would be right, and that's the exactly the point.  Real distributed systems do not always try to ensure linearizability. It turns out that many people, most particularly end users who ultimately pay for computer systems, conclude they don't really care so much about consistency of the sort CAP promises.  Here are two different types of reasons: 

1. Linearized consistency is expensive. Keeping active replicas up to date requires round trip messages between hosts, which can reduce transaction commit times by an order of magnitude or more. Users are allergic to slow response, regardless of any other benefits that slowness might bring.  Daniel Abadi pointed out this latency problem some time ago in a great blog post on CAP that is still excellent reading today.  

2. Linearized consistency is irrelevant for many applications. Consider a measurement from a household thermometer or a text message from a cell phone.  There is only one of each generated in a single location. Your servers either get them or they don't.  Multiple copies are just that: replicas of the same thing. Conflicts don't exist. 

The share of immutable data from analytic systems like Hadoop and object stores like Amazon S3 is increasing rapidly, which means that there is an increasing number of applications for which CAP is not the only or even a major design consideration. It might be in the guts of the system but it's just one of many problems at that level and there may be multiple choices. The original Hadoop architecture actually ignored CAP for one critical part of the system--the NameNode, which maps HDFS file names to storage, was a single point of failure.

Which brings us back to understanding CAP at a practical level.  Is it Excalibur or just the rusty knife?  At this point it feels like another tool in the toolbox that you use at the right time, albeit carefully. Imagine a band saw that does not have a very good guard on the blade. Here are my personal instructions for safe use. 

1. Use it for suitable problems.  The CAP theorem applies to a very specific problem involving systems that want to remain consistent and available across multiple networked hosts.  If you design clusters or distributed databases, this is a relatively big deal. The trade-offs are real and you have to think about them. 

For instance at Continuent we have some problems where the theorem is directly applicable. We build clusters that implement failover.  We have to consider how to establish consensus while keeping the cluster available even when members lose messages or respond slowly. The CAP theorem guides you to manage this kind of problem rather than try to solve it using techniques that will not work, such as adding timeouts on messages.  (Continuent Tungsten clusters are generally CP, in case you  are wondering.) 

2. Avoid CAP where it does not obviously apply. It is a tricky theorem to interpret correctly, and many applications are concerned with unrelated problems. I work a lot on transactional replication. There are no CAP issues in Tungsten Replicator.  At the other end of the spectrum if you build systems that link multiple stores using replication, you likely have multiple CAP choices under the covers.  That's a common pattern in complex applications. 

It is therefore important to look with a jaundiced eye upon any product that claims to "beat CAP," like this widely read article. This is just marketing hype. If your application matches the CAP theorem model, it applies and you are subject to the limitations. If the limitations don't seem to make sense you have not evaded them. You are either working on a problem to which CAP is not relevant or you made implicit CAP choices of which you are not aware. It is easy to make a fool of yourself by asserting otherwise. 

3. Other tools are important too.  CAP of course does not even cover all trade-offs in clusters.  There are also many issues to consider when building distributed data systems that actually work.  Latency, durability of data, monitoring, automation, reliability, ability to do zero-downtime maintenance, and security are critical. Especially security. That looks like the next big problem for a lot of existing distributed systems. 

Beyond these, don't stop thinking about CAP. It is one of those ideas that gets under your skin and really bugs you. In addition to Eric Brewer's 2012 article, Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch wrote a follow-up perspective on the implications of CAP, so even the originators are continuing to consider the problems. The long term value of CAP is that it has focused attention on a set of difficult data management problems and led to numerous productive ideas about how to manage them. The resulting evolution is not nearly finished.  We will all continue to worry this bone for many years to come. 

No Hadoop Fun for Me at SCaLE 12X :(

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about my upcoming MySQL/Hadoop talk at SCaLE 12X. Unfortunately I had to cancel. A few days after writing the article I came down with an eye problem that is fixed but prevents me from flying anywhere for a few weeks. That's a pity as I was definitely looking forward to attending the conference and explaining how Tungsten replicates transactions from MySQL into HDFS.

Meanwhile, we are still moving at full steam with Hadoop-related work at Continuent, which is the basis for the next major replication release, Tungsten Replicator 3.0.0. Binary builds and documentation will go up in a few days. There will also be many more public talks about Hadoop support, starting in April at Percona Live 2014. I hope you'll consider attending one of our talks there.  It's a great conference.

Since my SCaLE 12X talk won't be happening I would like to repeat the invitation to attend the Continuent webinar on loading from MySQL to Hadoop on Thursday February 27th.  It's essentially the same talk, but no airplanes are involved.

Why Aren't All Data Immutable?

Over the last few years there has been an increasing interest in immutable data management. This is a big change from the traditional update-in-place approach many database systems use today, where new values delete old values, which are then lost. With immutable data you record everything, generally using methods that append data from successive transactions rather than replacing them.  In some DBMS types you can access the older values, while in others the system transparently uses the old values to solve useful problems like implementing eventual consistency.

Baron Schwartz recently pointed out that it can be hard to get decent transaction processing performance based on append-only methods like append-only B-trees.  This is not a very strong argument against immutable data per se.  Immutable data are already in wide use.   It is actually surprising they have not made deeper inroads into online transaction processing, which is widely handled by relational DBMS servers like MySQL and Oracle.

Immutable Data Are Now Economically Feasible

One reason for the popularity of update-in-place approaches is simple: storage used to be really expensive. This is no longer the case.  Many applications can now afford to store the entire DBMS transaction log almost indefinitely. To illustrate, look at storage costs in Amazon Web Services. Applications running in Amazon have API-level access to practically unlimited replicated, long-term storage through services like S3 and Glacier. Amazon conveniently publishes prices that serve as good proxies for storage costs in general.  Using these numbers, I worked up a simple spread sheet that shows the cost of storing 7 years of transactions for a made-up business application.

To start with, assume our sample app generates one thousand transactions per second at 1,000 bytes per transaction.  This is not exceedingly busy by some standards but is relatively high for business systems that handle human-generated transactions.  The main place you see numbers approaching this level is SaaS businesses that handle many customers on a single system.   Our sample system generates about 205,591 gigabytes of data over seven years.

Xacts/Sec	Bytes/Xact	Bytes/Sec	GB Generated in 1 Hour	GB Generated in 1 Day	GB Generated in 1 Month	GB Generated in 1 Year	GB Generated in 7 Years
1,000	1,000	1,000,000	3.35	80.47	2,447.52	29,370.19	205,591.32

Amazon storage costs vary from $0.011/Gb/month for Glacier to $0.09/Gb/month for S3 with full redundancy. (These are numbers for the US-West region as of 29 December 2013.) Annual storage costs for 7 years of data are pretty hefty if you store uncompressed data. However, if you factor in compression--for example MySQL binlogs tend to compress around 90% in my experience--things start to look a lot better.

	Annual cost to store 7 years of data at different levels of compression
	0%	20%	40%	60%	70%	80%	90%
Glacier	$27,138.05	$21,710.44	$16,282.83	$10,855.22	$8,141.42	$5,427.61	$2,713.81
S3 Reduce Redundancy	$177,630.90	$142,104.72	$106,578.54	$71,052.36	$53,289.27	$35,526.18	$17,763.09
S3 Standard	$222,038.63	$177,630.90	$133,223.18	$88,815.45	$66,611.59	$44,407.73	$22,203.86

The raw costs still look hefty to the untrained eye, but we need to factor in the real expense of operating this type of system.  Here's a typical cost structure for a 3 node cluster (to ensure HA) with labor costs factored in and preserving 7 years of data.  I have put in generously small IT overhead costs including software development, since the code has to come from somewhere. Under these assumptions long-term storage costs are less 10% of the yearly cost of operation.

Component	Cost	Percentage	Notes
3 i2.4xlarge instances	$46,306.68	20.09%	(Heavy utilization reserved, 1 yr. term)
3 support licenses	$15,000.00	6.51%	(Support subscription costs * 3x)
Raw dbadmin labor	$12,000.00	5.21%	(1 FTE/30 DBMS servers @ 120K per)
Software dev/QA	$120,000.00	52.06%	(10 FTE/30 DBMS servers @ 120K per)
Misc. overhead costs	$15,000.00	6.51%	($5K per server)
S3 Storage	$22,203.86	9.63%	(7 years of data, 90% compression)
Total	$230,510.54	100.00%

Long storage costs for base transaction data can be far lower if any of the following hold:

• You generate fewer transactions per second or they are smaller.  Many business apps produce far fewer transactions than my example. 
• You don't keep data for the full 7 years.  Some of the analytic users I work with just keep a couple of years. 
• You are already paying archiving costs for backups, in which case the additional storage cost becomes a wash if you can stop using a separate backup system.
• You add more external costs to the picture--running a real business that generates this level of transactions often takes far more people than are shown in my projection. 

In these cases long term storage costs could be in the 1-2% range as a percentage of IT operating costs. Over time storage costs will decrease--though the rate of decline is hard to predict--so each year the number systems able to afford preservation of complete transaction histories will corresponding increase. This is particularly true for business transactions, which tend to be human generated and subject to upper growth limits once businesses are fully automated.  If you push data into Glacier, economically feasible retention periods can run to decades.  This is far longer than most businesses (or more particularly their lawyers) even want to keep information around.

There are still reasons for wanting an update-in-place model for OLTP systems, for example to keep as much of your working set as possible in RAM or on fast SSDs to keep response time low.  But storage cost alone is no longer a major factor for a wide range of applications.  This development is already affecting data management technology profoundly.  Doug Cutting has pointed out on numerous occasions that the downward cost trajectory of commodity storage was a key driver in the development of Hadoop.

Users Want Immutable Data

Many organizations already keep long transaction histories to feed analytics by loading them into traditional data warehouses based on Teradata, Vertica, and the like.  As soon as a practical method appeared to keep such data more economically, businesses began to adopt it quickly.  That "method" is Hadoop.

Hadoop has a fundamentally different approach to data management from relational and even many NoSQL systems.  For one thing, immutable data are fundamental.  The default processing model is that you write data but rarely change it once written.  To illustrate, the HiveQL SQL dialect does not even have UPDATE or DELETE statements.  Instead, you overwrite entire tables or parts of them to make changes.  This works because Hadoop organizes storage on cheap commodity hardware (HDFS) and provides a workable way to access data programmatically (MapReduce).

Hadoop changes the data management cost model in other ways besides utilizing commodity hardware efficiently.  With Hadoop you don't necessary define *any* data structures up front.  Instead, you store transactions in native form and write programs to interpret them later on.  If you need structure for efficient queries you add it through MapReduce and perhaps store it as a materialized view to make other queries more efficient.  Hadoop eliminates a lot of the up-front effort (and risk) required to get transactions into a data warehouse.  Instead, it defers those costs until you actually need to run specific analytics.  Moreover by storing native transaction formats, you can answer new questions years later.  That is a very powerful benefit.

I have been working a lot with Hadoop over the last few months.  It's a bear to use because it consists of a set of loosely integrated and rapidly evolving projects with weak documentation and lots of bugs. Even with these difficulties, the rising level of Hadoop adoption for analytics shows the underlying model has legs and that users want it.  As Floyd Strimling pointed out a while ago on Twitter this genie is not going back in the bottle.  HDFS is becoming the default storage mechanism for vast quantities of data.

Immutable Data Management Looks Like a Good Bet

One of the basic problems in discussing immutable data management is that there are different kinds of immutable data that persist at different timescales.  Baron has a point that Couchbase, Datanomic, NuoDB, or whatever new DBMS implementation you choose are in some ways recapitulating solutions that existing RDBMS implementations reached long ago.  But I also think that's not necessarily the right comparison when talking about immutable data, especially when you start to think about long retentions.

The fact is that Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and the like do not utilize distributed commodity storage effectively and they certainly do not enable storage of the long tail transaction histories that many businesses clearly want for analytics.  The best way to do that is to replicate transactions into HDFS and work on them there.  That is hard even for MySQL, which has flexible and economical replication options.  (We are working on making it easier to do at Continuent but that's another article. :)

In my opinion a more useful criticism of the arriviste competitors of traditional OLTP systems is that they don't go far enough with immutable data and risk being outflanked by real-time transaction handling built on top of HDFS. Hadoop real-time work on projects like Apache Spark is for the time being is focused on analytics but OLTP support cannot be far behind.  Moreover, there is a window to build competitors to HDFS that gets smaller as Hadoop becomes more entrenched.  This seems more interesting than building stores that offer only incremental improvements over existing RDBMS implementations.

Immutable data now permeate IT due to decreasing storage costs coupled with requirements for analytic processing. It's like the famous quote from William Gibson:

The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed.

If you look at the big picture the arguments for database management based on immutable data seem pretty strong.  It is hard to believe it won't be a persistent trend in DBMS design.  Over the long term mutable data look increasingly like a special case rather than the norm.

Fun with MySQL and Hadoop at SCaLE 12X

It's my pleasure to be presenting at SCaLE 12X on the subject of real-time data loading from MySQL to Hadoop.  This is the first public talk on work at Continuent that enables Tungsten Replicator to move transactions from MySQL to HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System).  I will explain how replication to Hadoop works, how to set it up, and offer a few words on constructing views of MySQL data using tools like Hive.

As usual with replication everything we are doing on Hadoop replication is open source.  Builds and documentation will be publicly available by the 21st of February, which is when the talk happens.  Hadoop support is already in testing with Continuent customers, and we have confidence that we can handle basic loading cases already.  That said, Hadoop is a complex beast with lots of use cases, and we need feedback from the community on how to make Tungsten loading support better.  My colleagues and I plan to do a lot of talks about Hadoop to help community users get up to speed.

Here is a tiny taste of what MySQL to Hadoop loading looks like.  Most MySQL users are familiar with sysbench.  Have you ever wondered what sysbench tables would look like in Hadoop?  Let's use the following sysbench command to apply transactions to table db01.sbtest:

sysbench --test=oltp --db-driver=mysql --mysql-host=logos1 --mysql-db=db01 \
    --mysql-user=tungsten --mysql-password=secret \
    --oltp-read-only=off --oltp-table-size=10000 \
    --oltp-index-updates=4 --oltp-non-index-updates=2 --max-requests=200000 \
    --max-time=900 --num-threads=5 run

This results in rows that look like the following in MySQL:

mysql> select * from sbtest where id = 2841\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
 id: 2841
  k: 2
  c: 958856489-674262868-320369638-679749255-923517023-47082008-646125665-898439458-1027227482-602181769
pad: qqqqqqqqqqwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrtttttttttt

After replication into Hadoop with Tungsten, we can crunch the log records using a couple of HiveQL queries to generate a point-in-time snapshot of the sbtest table on HDFS.  By a point-in-time snapshot, I mean that a table that contains not only inserted data but also shows the results of subsequent update and delete operations on each row up to a particular point in time.  We can now run the same query to see the data: 

hive> select * from sbtest where id = 2841;
Total MapReduce jobs = 1
Launching Job 1 out of 1
...
Job 0: Map: 1   Cumulative CPU: 0.74 sec   HDFS Read: 901196 HDFS Write: 158 SUCCESS
Total MapReduce CPU Time Spent: 740 msec
OK
2841 2 958856489-674262868-320369638-679749255-923517023-47082008-646125665-898439458-1027227482-602181769 qqqqqqqqqqwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrtttttttttt

Tungsten does a lot more than just move transaction data, of course.  It also provides tools to generate Hive schema, performs transformations on columns to make them match the limited HiveQL datatypes, and arranges data in a way that allows you generate materialized views for analytic usage (like the preceding example) with minimal difficulty.

If you want to learn more about how Tungsten does all of this magic, please attend the talk.  I hope to see you in Los Angeles.

p.s., If you cannot attend SCaLE 12X, we will have a Continuent webinar on the same subject the following week.  (Sign up here.)

Why I Love Open Source

Anders Karlsson wrote about Some myths on Open Source, the way I see it a few days ago.  Anders' article is mostly focused on exploding the idea that open source magically creates high quality code.  It is sad to say you do not have to look very far to see how true this is.

While I largely agree with Anders' points, there is far more that could be said on this subject, especially on the benefits of open source. I love working on open source software. Here are three reasons that are especially important to me.

1.) Open source is a great way to disseminate technology to users.  In the best cases, it is this easy to get open source products up and running:

$ sudo apt-get install software-i-want-to-use

A lot of software companies (mine included) open source their software because it gets product into the hands of people who might pay money for it later.  The strategy worked brilliantly for MySQL AB as Anders pointed out. MongoDB is repeating the tactic with what looks like equal success.  There has been a lot of pointless argument over the years about whetherMySQL or MongoDB are "real databases." Being easy to get is just as critical to adoption as features like transactions and scalable performance.

Open source is therefore even better for users, who can quickly decide if something works for them and provide feedback through communities about problems as well as suggested improvement.  To the extent open source software has high quality, it originates in the tight feedback loop between software producers and their user communities.  That in turn leads to faster innovation with fewer deviations from real user needs.  In olden days we called this getting the requirements right.  Open source projects often do it extraordinarily well.

2.) Open source allows like-minded communities of developers to create products that would otherwise never happen.   Linux became a dominant operating system in large part through the staggering scale of contributions enabled by exceptionally well-managed open source development.  Linus Torvalds recently pointed out that Linux kernel releases have patches from a thousand contributors or more.  Thanks to the wide range of contributions, Linux operates on everything from tiny ARM processors to servers with over 200 cores.  The development effort underlying the Linux ecosystem is huge when you include the kernel and all the packages that install over it. It dwarfs  any comparable operating system effort I can think of.

At the other end of the spectrum there are small but incredibly useful projects like Apache Curator.  The Curator project currently has 8 project members, mostly from different companies, who collaborate to make Apache ZooKeeper vastly easier to program.  I doubt libraries like Curator would even exist without open source licenses and infrastructure like distributed source code management.  Either would ZooKeeper, for that matter.

Not every line of open source code is excellent or even above average.  (I'm looking at you, Hadoop.)  That said, open source projects are not so much about code but communities of developers who understand and are interested in solving a specific problem.  Besides direct feedback from real users, this is the other prerequisite for creating truly great products.  Clean code is helpful but not necessary.

3.) Open source means your creations can never be taken away from you.  In many creative endeavors work belongs to the people who employ you.  It effectively disappears when you change jobs.  Putting code on GitHub or code.google.com breaks that bond.  Knowing that anything you create will always be accessible removes any hesitation about revealing your best ideas.  I believe this is one of the drivers behind the flowering of creativity that infuses so many open source projects.

At the same time working on open source software is not all peaches and cream.  Building successful businesses on open source is hard, which limits the opportunities to work on it for a living.

For instance, if most of the value of your product is in the software itself there is not much motivation for users to pay you.  I think that's one reason mobile apps are by-and-large for pay or at least not open source.  You need to find a business model that brings in enough money over time to fund the sort of concentrated engineering necessary to build robust software.  Successful open source businesses often depend on finding the right markets or achieving network effects, and not all software can fit the pattern.

The good news is that once you get the economics right it really wrong-foots your closed source competitors.  RedHat has built a great business packaging and supporting open source for enterprises.  They see open source as a competitive advantage that extends their market reach and speeds up innovation.  An increasing number of companies producing DBMS software take the same view as they try to disrupt data management.   Outside of enterprise software Valve Software is attacking proprietary gaming platforms through open source.

It's great to see the growing number of businesses based on open source development. When the model works it is incredibly satisfying. I guess this is a fourth reason why I love working on open source software.