Research Proposal on "Comparison of Database Management Systems"

Research Proposal 12 pages (3329 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Management Systems

Appendix a Project Process Integration Diagram

Appendix B Process Flow Chart

Open Source Security Tools

DBMS Features Analysis

Figure 2 Three Pillars of Security

The database market continues to consolidate with Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems, who had acquired MySQL AB in January, 2008. While there are dozens of vendors in the database management systems (DBMS) market, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle dominate the market with 88% market share according to International Data Corporation (Worthen, Kiviniemi, 2009). As DBMSs are often customized to the specific needs of the companies using them, this consolidation does not spell the end of the heterogeneous nature of this market. Organizations' needs are so diverse and the structure of their data and use of applications so varied, that the many vendors in this market are staying relevant and growing as a result. This fragmentation of the database market has opened up significant opportunities for Computer Associates (CA), Software AG, Sybase and many open source databases the highest performing being Ingres, MySQL and PostgreSQL. The lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and speed of new product development innovation in open source, specifically MySQL, has redefined the direction of the DBMS market globally (Hyatt, 2008). Oracle as a result continues to be in a defensive posture with regard to the economics of open source, hence their acquisition of Sun Microsystems which includes MySQL AB (Worthen, Kiviniemi, 2009). As a result of these market dynamics, MySQL continues to excel from a technological and user adoption perspective (Denton, Peace, 2003). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate MySQL's technical functionality vs. To PostgreSQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Components of their current offering, market presence and strategy are defined.

Introduction

For the typical enterprise today the need for integrating a variety of databases is critical, as each contributes a unique strength to an enterprise-wide strategy. The majority of enterprise and organizations are integrating several databases together, each specifically designed for a given applications' needs (Giacomo, 2005). Open source DBMS have had the advantage of a lower TCO, faster potential time-to-market given the open source community's level of innovation relative to enterprise software companies (Hyatt, 2008) and the expanded security model which MySQL has been able to fine-tune the shared security model of their kernel as well (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006). In analyzing a performance benchmarks of open source vs. enterprise applications (Denton, Peace, 2003) (Giacomo, 2005) (Hyatt, 2008) (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006) and (Ramsey, 2003) it is clear that the performance of MySQL on platform scalability and user adoption is exceptional compared to other competing DBMS. MySQL also has concentrated on adoption, and has a result significantly driven up the total user count on their systems as a result (Hyatt, 2008). Application data integration, 3rd party application support, performance analysis, scalability, database programming and application development are all critical factors as well. This report concentrates on a compatibility and performance of Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle 11g and PostgreSQL. The specific product versions include Microsoft SQL Server 2008, MySQL 5.1, Oracle 11g, and PostgreSQL 8.3. The majority of these databases were introduced in the late 2008 timeframe, with Oracle 11g being released in October, 2007. The three dominant uses of databases are Online Transaction processing (OLTP), data warehouses and specialized databases. Each of these databases began with the explicit design goal of providing relational database performance in the context of OLTP in the context of role-based workflows. The catalyst of growth for databases, both closed source and open source, continues to be the growth of roles-based technologies including Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (Denton, Peace, 2003). MySQL and PostgreSQL have historically lagged in terms of enterprise application support yet have had exceptional growth in security modeling and Web Services. For a matrix overview of representative security utilities and tools on open source DMBS including MySQL please see the Appendix C Open Source Security Tools in the Appendix. In conjunction with the security models open source DBMS developers are adopting, analysis indicates open source DMBS can be more security that closed source (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006) (Ramsey, 2003). These configurations of DBMS are highly dependent on the security requirements and security audit procedures of the organizations adopting them (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006). From the analysis completed for this paper the scalability and platform support for open source, as of 2006, continues to surpass closed source. As the TCO is much lower for MySQL and PostgreSQL there has also been a corresponding increase in interest from system integrators and resellers in these open source DBMS. The reason is that the maintenance frees for Oracle 11g and Microsoft SQL Server continue to escalate rapidly which has also created interest in closed database customers' organizations to seek out the cost advantages of open source as well (Spanbauer, 2008).

Discussion

Analyzing attributes or characteristics of the current offerings of closed database vendors Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Oracle 11g in addition to open source vendors MySQL and PostgreSQL is the intent of this analysis. Within the current offering, the criteria of performance and scalability, security and adoption of security models, application development, database security, platform support and database administration can be used as a common set of criteria for evaluating closed source and open source offerings. Next, the strategy of the vendors including their product strategy direction, and commitment to the specific design objectives are discussed. Finally factors including company financials, adoption rate, training and certification and system integrator and partner support are evaluated. What emerges from this analysis is an assessment of each of the DBMS.

Across the four DBMS being included in this analysis, it is noteworthy that MySQL 5.1 has the greatest level of reliability as shown by the multiple technologies that are used. Even Oracle 11g, the highest capitalized DBMS from a product development standpoint, has only bitmapped, B-tree, IOT and function-based security. It does not however include full-text, which is essential when a database is being as the foundation of an enterprise content management system for example (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006). Table 1, DBMS Features Analysis provides an assessment of these applications across the functional areas of data storage, indexes support, data integrity, replication, interface methods and Advanced Features. Of the open sources databases the one with the best possible scalability is MySQL. This is specifically due to the design of the OLTP engine and structure within the applications' platform (Ramsey, 2003) (Spanbauer, 2008).

Figure 1: DBMS Features Analysis

MySQL 5.1

PostgreSQL 8.3

Oracle 11g

Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Data Storage

Reliability

MyISAM, InnoDB, Berkeley DB, full-text

Postgres

Bitmapped, B-tree, IOT, function-based

Clustered, nonclustered

Scalability

Large/Very Large

Large

Large/Very Large

Large/Very Large

Indexes

Single and Multi-column, primary key, full text

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Data Integrity

ACID compliance, row-level locking, hot backup and partial backup

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Replication

Single master

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Multimaster

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Clustering

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Interface Methods

ODBC/JDBC, C/C++, & J2EE

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Advanced Features

Stored procedures, views, triggers, sequences and cursors

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Sources: (Denton, Peace, 2003)(Giacomo, 2005)(Goans, Leach, Vogel, 2006) (Hyatt, 2008) (Ramsey, 2003) (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006) and websites

Each of the four database are now analyzed according to the nine attributes of platform scalability, user adoption, application data integration, 3rd party application support, performance analysis, database programming and application development. While the closed source vendors have gone aggressively in the direction of creating Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and composite applications through Web Services (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006) open source DBMS providers have continued to focus on making their core OLTP performance improve significantly over time (Hyatt, 2008).

As a result of the open source DBMS providers concentrating on this aspect first their product roadmaps have taken them in the direction of supporting greater platform breadth which according to studies from AMR Research, Gartner Group and International Data Corporation (Hyatt, 2008) they are achieving greater levels of RDBS and associated application scalability as well. In analyzing the four vendors including in this paper, MySQL is the most scalable from both an DBMS and application platform standpoint (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006). This is due to the kernel for MySQL being scalable and also modular enough for continual improvement and addition of functionality. All of these factors in conjunction with their support for Very Large Database (VLDB) architectures has open source vendors delivering greater levels of scalability and also more agnostic or non-vendor specific as well. Microsoft and Oracle both tend to see integration often from a purely myopic view; they see only the integration of their components toe ach other and to partners' applications. Open source is forced due to its heavy reliance on innovation to concentrate on having a more heterogeneous and therefore varied integration strategy (Hyatt, 2008). This forces DBMS vendors to continually benchmark OLTP, data warehousing, and Web-based application development to ensure they are continually improving inter-database and inter-process scalability and performance (Pereira, Muppavarapu, Chung, 2006). This has become a best practices specifically for open source… READ MORE

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