Thursday, November 4, 2010

Calpont InfiniDB 2.0 and BI QuickStarts

The 2.0 release of Calpont InfiniDB
is ready for download. New features for the columnar database storage engine for MySQL include data compression, fully parallelized & scalable UDFs, and partition drop has been added to the automatic vertical & horizontal data partitioning.

    Benefits of InfiniDB Enterprise 2.0
  • 20-50% query performance improvement when reading from disk
  • Distributed in-database calculations provide greater flexibility to the data analyst, and enable faster performance for deep analytics
  • Removing obsolete data from the database quickly frees up disk storage and improves query response

And for those of you new to data warehousing and business intelligence, there are QuickStart for data reporting tools from Japersoft, BIRT, and Pentaho plus a guide for using Pentaho spoon with the Calpont Infinidb bulk loader.

4 comments:

erkules said...

Nice to read. How is InfiniDB implemented? Is it a SE and UDFs? Why Im asking? I would be cool to spread InfiniDB as a SE-Plugin (even if simplified) to empower much more people to use/play with it additionally:)

rpbouman said...

Erkules, I guess dave should explain in more detail, but I can answer at least a few of your questions.

InfiniDB is essentially the MySQL server front-end (protocol, connections and probably query cache) patched so it includes InfiniDB column store, but also language constructs (functoins) and optimizer.

Although it seems like a great idea to simply plugin a column-oriented storage engine, it just won't work. The MySQL storage engine api is pretty much row-oriented, and I can't see how the vanilla optimizer could realistically work with a column store. So you really need to throw in a query optimizer that understands column stores too. In addition, InfiniDB implements it's own vertical partitioning, compression and I believe it also shreds and distributes queries - all these things are outside the responsibility of just the storage engine.

Really, InfiniDB is a very thin layer of MySQL on top of an entire database system of its own.

Dave Stokes said...

Erkules, as Roland so concisely said, Calpont InfiniDB is a complex system that has a MySQL front front end and a lot of very cool engineering behind. For instance, take the horizontal and vertical partitioning of the data that greatly increases search speed. Software is needed to perform that work that is beyond the scope of a plugin.

Calpont InfiniDB was designed to look like just another MySQL storage engine to your applications. Just like MyISAM, InnoDB or any of the others. But it is designed to very quickly handle the large volumes of data needed in data warehouses and business intelligence applications.

And you can try the Enterprise Edition with MPP free for 30 days.

erkules said...

@Roland and Dave
Thx to both of you for the good explanation.