Redis -- key pair and replication

DBAs seem to be getting hit over the head with the NoSQL message while trying to keep their SQL systems going. SQL does have its place in the world¹ and much of the NoSQL push seems to be a way to get past some of SQL's limitations. But simply moving from a proven technology and infrastructure to something new with fad overtones is not going to make life easier for Joe Average DBA. Redis is one of those project that will get notice from a lot of DBAs looking for a very fast key-value datastore.

Redis keeps the dataset in memory but writes to disk asynchronously and reloaded when Redis is restarted. Or the data can be saved each time a command is issued or on schedule to minimize data loss.

Redis also has master-slave replication and setup consists of a 'slave of x.x.x.x' line in the slave's config file. And is the only trivial thing about Redis.

The Command Reference shows a lot of thought and hard work has gone into Redis. Redis has a lot to offer Joe Average DBA without making him forsake his comfortable base.

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1. SQL is not going away. And not like COBOL, FORTRAN or I Love Lucy not going away. SQL solves too many problems to be pushed aside. It does have limitations but cleaver engineering will mitigate them.

Open Source BI Report tools

I am going to take a mulligan on a previous Blog Post on Open Source BI reporting tools. Part of my job at Calpont is getting familiar with tools folks with use with the InfiniDB storage engine. After all, what is the point of having all those terabytes in a data warehouse if you can not produce some sort of report from them. Three popular open source BI reporting tools are available from BIRT, Pentaho, and Jaspersoft.

Proceeding alphabetically, BIRT is part of the Eclipse IDE world. A BI report is a new project or new report under a project. And if you like Eclipse or Java IDEs, then you will probably like BIRT for reports.

Pentaho's Rerport Designer is a stand alone program. As is iReport from Jaspersoft.

I had no problems connection to a data mart in a InfiniDB instance with the old JDBC connection with any of the products. And all three produced reports of various levels of complexity from my SQL. Plus you can pretty much format the exams to your heart's content.

So which is better? That would be up to the user having to run the software. For those of you really interested, there will be quick start guides up soon on each of the three BI tools on the Calpont InfiniDB website. If I missed your favorite BI reporting tool, please let me know.

Now I am digging through the ETL tools. I was getting a millions and a half rows a second into an InfiniDB table using the cpimport tool. Now to get the tools and cpimport working together!