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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a publicly available computation
and storage platform hosted within Amazon’s vast
infrastructure of hardware and software resources. This is the
Amazon “cloud”. AWS offers a set of s ervices that an
individual developer or IT organization may subscribe to and
utilize with affordable “pay as you go” pricing: (EC2) for
computing, Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage, CloudFront
for content delivery, Simple Queue Service (SQS) for
message queuing, and SimpleDB for data management.
To allow developers to quickly extend their development
environments to Amazon, Sybase has created Amazon
Machine Images (AMI) for its server products for use in
development and testing. Sybase’s data warehouse and
analytics product, Sybase IQ, is hosted as one of these freely
available AMIs.
Sybase IQ is a high-performance decision support server designed
specifically for data warehousing. Although
designed before cloud computing’s recent popularity, Sybase IQ
fits well into the cloud computing paradigm.
what makes a data management service “cloud friendly”?
If you are familiar with AWS, you will know that Amazon already
offers a data management service called SimpleDB
It was designed specifically for the Amazon cloud. Cloud
services need to support easy, effective and safe use by
clients, who are removed from the management and maintenance of
the services. Amazon promotes the following“cloud friendly”
attributes of SimpleDB:
Scalable:• grow capacity as demand increases
Secure:• data is protected
Simple to use:• you can easily add, retrieve and modify
data
Flexible:• data structures do not need to be defined in
advance
Fast:• quick access to data
Low touch:• minimal system management requirements
Inexpensive:• uses computation and storage resources
efficiently
As its name implies, SimpleDB is simple compared to
traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS)
With SimpleDB, user data is structured, but requires no schema.
There is an easy to use API for fast storage and access
of your data. With SimpleDB, you represent data as
items with sets of attribute/value pairs, partitioned into
logical
containers called domains. You can scale SimpleDB easily by
adding new domains for your data. Data is structured,
but the structure is malleable. You store and access data using
a basic and straightforward API. To secure your data,
authentication, authorization and encryption are all supported
within SimpleDB.
what is sybase iQ all about?
Sybase IQ is a relational, column-oriented database (RDBMS), so
it is fundamentally different from SimpleDB.
As with most RDBMS platforms, Sybase IQ has sophisticated data
representation and query capabilities, along with
data integrity and consistency support. It is scalable and
highly available via its Multiplex clustering capability. But
Sybase IQ is an RDBMS with a distinct difference. First, it is
an analytics engine that focuses primarily on quick service
for many concurrent readers. This contrasts with an OLTP server
that must allow many users to update rows in the
database in random fashion, without interfering with one
another. (With Sybase IQ, only one writer may write to a
table at a time. This simplifies concurrency control among the
writers. A technique called “snapshot versioning” allow
readers to query the version of data that existed before updates
occur, without blocking on the writers.)
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To deliver fast query response, Sybase IQ has a distinct
architectural difference from most relational databases. It
has a unique architecture where the columns within a table are
stored independently from each other. Queries target
only the columns needed to compute the desired results, rather
than sorting through irrelevant data in other columns
This naturally speeds the process. In addition, the column-based
approach allows for optimized compression,
sometimes 10 to 1 compression or higher, because the data in
each column has a consistent data type. Sybase IQ
places an index on each column when the data is inserted, and
additional indexes can be created at relatively low cost
because they are compressed like the data. The broad array of
indexes make ad hoc query processing fast, because
indexes are tailored to the data, not a particular query.
how is sybase iQ “cloud friendly”?
As with SimpleDB, a cloud-friendly database needs to be a
scalable, secure, simple to use, flexible, fast, low
touch and
inexpensive data management service. Let’s look at these
characteristics, and show how Sybase IQ exhibits them as well.
First, Sybase IQ, like all enterprise-worthy RDBMS systems, is
scalable. It can be configured as a clustered set of
servers that access a shared data store. And because clients are
primarily readers who don’t collide with each other as
writers can, it scales linearly when you add servers to the
multiplex.
Sybase IQ is simpler to use and
more flexible than many other analytic engines because it
is less sensitive to the
schema of the data. With many row-based OLAP servers,
star-schema design, judicious index creation, and layering
of OLAP structures such as cubes, are critical for achieving
query performance against large data sets. This tuning
is ongoing as new and different types of queries are introduced.
But with Sybase IQ, the extensive, up front and
compressed indexing, the column independence, and large I/O
block movement between memory and disk combined
with caching, all contribute to fast performance without
requiring such careful design of the structure of the data.
With all data indexed up front, Sybase IQ handles ad hoc queries
well. This makes it low touch, because continual
index tuning is not required. And with its superior data
compression, Sybase IQ is an efficient use of storage space,
making it relatively inexpensive in a pay-per-use
model.
try out sybase iQ in the cloud
Sybase IQ is an evolved, high performing data warehouse and
analytics platform that exhibits many characteristics
that make it an attractive candidate for storing and analyzing
your data in the cloud.
For more information about Sybase’s support of Amazon’s Web
Services, visitwww.sybase.com/cloudcomputing .
