Well, there are quite a few commercial database vendors that offer parallel and clustered RDBMS products, and many of them appear to be quite good.
Unfortunately, they've got a terrible marketing problem.
Before 1998 or so, a relational database was an expensive product that you got from a vendor like Oracle. Since then, a generation of people have grown up that think about using a commercial RDBMS the same way most of us think about putting our hands in a toilet.
@va_coder hits the nail right on the head, it's not just the cost of the product, it's the cost of the buying process.
If I want to trial a product that is open source or has an OS or free edition (that could be mysql, mongodb, postgres or even Virtoso OpenLink or SQL Server Express) I can download it, read the docs and play around with it and learn a lot in a few hours. I might learn that the product is not for me, or I might get a positive impression and feel ready to commit coding time to it.
If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.)
Even if they give me a 30 day free trial, I could easily spend $500+ of my time just getting the trial... And once I've gotten to the point where I'm negotiating with one vendor I'm going to feel a lot of pressure (internally or from my superiors) to talk with some competitive vendors too to make sure I'm making the right decision.
It's a shame because, certainly, a company like Clustrix could use the revenue they get from product sales to support an awesome development team and really deliver a better product. On the other hand, they have marketing channels that are aimed at large organizations that can afford an expensive buying experience... and it's an expensive selling process for them when they've got to do "complex sales" that require approvals from a large number of stakeholders. They've got to pass those costs onto you.
The trouble with this model is that tomorrow's large organizations are today's small organizations. Today, Facebook could afford just about any commercial software that's out there. However, they made critical technology decisions (that are difficult to reverse) back when they were a little company that could only afford MySQL.
On the other hand, allowing potential customers to easily try your product can destroy your chances at gaining them.
Here's a quick example:
A few years back, I was writing Smalltalk web systems and evaluating which commercial implementation to use. The two big ones that bubbled to the top of the list then were Gemstone and Cincom.
Cincom offered a relatively familiar set up which would require using sticky sessions for the web server, and another backend database like PostgreSQL.
Gemstone offered pearls on a platter: shared session state across all the backends, and a build in distributed object database. I thought it would be brilliant, and reading their blogs and documentations gave no hint of any pitfalls.
Cimcom was a download away---as were any of the free smalltalks---but Gemstone then required you to contact their sales staff before playing with it. So I made a mistake and chose Gemstone, and the system was built to target their as of yet unseen architecture. When I finally got to use Gemstone, it was a mess!
If I had that experience to start with rather than just their glowing self-produced reports, I'd have never picked Gemstone and instead gone with the familiar "kludgy" system that was "good enough".
If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.)
If Clustrix offered cloud-based deployment of their database, they could have a small free tier for people to play around with. Add a console applicaiton for accessing the API. Make it really developer friendly.
If they had that, I'd be trying it out in a flash. Then what if they had a per-usage pricing system like AWS? Something where you pay per gigabyte. Something that allows you to test stuff out for a few dollars a mount, and then when you're ready, scale it right up to a few thousand or more.
Presumably at some point they will offer a cloud-based service. It particularly makes sense given the fundamental design of their product.
Since they only launched their product quite recently, it is understandable that they would want to test it with several customers before offering it as a service.
In fact, if the product scales well enough, it would be perfect for deploying as a cloud-based service and could be very successful as such.
Comments
Well, there are quite a few commercial database vendors that offer parallel and clustered RDBMS products, and many of them appear to be quite good.
Unfortunately, they've got a terrible marketing problem.
Before 1998 or so, a relational database was an expensive product that you got from a vendor like Oracle. Since then, a generation of people have grown up that think about using a commercial RDBMS the same way most of us think about putting our hands in a toilet.
@va_coder hits the nail right on the head, it's not just the cost of the product, it's the cost of the buying process.
If I want to trial a product that is open source or has an OS or free edition (that could be mysql, mongodb, postgres or even Virtoso OpenLink or SQL Server Express) I can download it, read the docs and play around with it and learn a lot in a few hours. I might learn that the product is not for me, or I might get a positive impression and feel ready to commit coding time to it.
If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.)
Even if they give me a 30 day free trial, I could easily spend $500+ of my time just getting the trial... And once I've gotten to the point where I'm negotiating with one vendor I'm going to feel a lot of pressure (internally or from my superiors) to talk with some competitive vendors too to make sure I'm making the right decision.
It's a shame because, certainly, a company like Clustrix could use the revenue they get from product sales to support an awesome development team and really deliver a better product. On the other hand, they have marketing channels that are aimed at large organizations that can afford an expensive buying experience... and it's an expensive selling process for them when they've got to do "complex sales" that require approvals from a large number of stakeholders. They've got to pass those costs onto you.
The trouble with this model is that tomorrow's large organizations are today's small organizations. Today, Facebook could afford just about any commercial software that's out there. However, they made critical technology decisions (that are difficult to reverse) back when they were a little company that could only afford MySQL.
On the other hand, allowing potential customers to easily try your product can destroy your chances at gaining them.
Here's a quick example:
A few years back, I was writing Smalltalk web systems and evaluating which commercial implementation to use. The two big ones that bubbled to the top of the list then were Gemstone and Cincom.
Cincom offered a relatively familiar set up which would require using sticky sessions for the web server, and another backend database like PostgreSQL.
Gemstone offered pearls on a platter: shared session state across all the backends, and a build in distributed object database. I thought it would be brilliant, and reading their blogs and documentations gave no hint of any pitfalls.
Cimcom was a download away---as were any of the free smalltalks---but Gemstone then required you to contact their sales staff before playing with it. So I made a mistake and chose Gemstone, and the system was built to target their as of yet unseen architecture. When I finally got to use Gemstone, it was a mess!
If I had that experience to start with rather than just their glowing self-produced reports, I'd have never picked Gemstone and instead gone with the familiar "kludgy" system that was "good enough".
If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.)
If Clustrix offered cloud-based deployment of their database, they could have a small free tier for people to play around with. Add a console applicaiton for accessing the API. Make it really developer friendly.
Imagine if you could just type:
If they had that, I'd be trying it out in a flash. Then what if they had a per-usage pricing system like AWS? Something where you pay per gigabyte. Something that allows you to test stuff out for a few dollars a mount, and then when you're ready, scale it right up to a few thousand or more.Presumably at some point they will offer a cloud-based service. It particularly makes sense given the fundamental design of their product.
Since they only launched their product quite recently, it is understandable that they would want to test it with several customers before offering it as a service.
In fact, if the product scales well enough, it would be perfect for deploying as a cloud-based service and could be very successful as such.
Ah, I didn't realise their product was only recently released.
Small nit: You can download Oracle 11g (or 10g) strait off their website for free — you just need to sign up for a free developer account.
Here's a link: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-editio...