Folk who know me will know I was a big fan of a relational database solution called ‘Clustra’. Some years ago, I did a lot of work with the company. It was an excellent solution that, unfortunately, was a couple of years ahead of the Grid thing for which it would be ideally suited (think distributed database over cheap 1U boxen).
Regrettably for me though, Sun Microsystems bought Clustra (on my birthday of all days, to double the pain), and proceeded to bury it deep in iPlanet for the persistence layer. A wasted purchase if ever I saw one. That said, there were rumblings from sources they might do something, but it never materialised, and I continued to support Microsoft SQL Server and think back to the good times with Clustra.
So news today that Sun might release their own DB (aka, “Sun DB”: via /.) comes as no particular surprise. They’re sat on an excellent code base with an excellent and unique feature list. I also happen to know the product very well indeed, so know that in its last released form still needed a bit of work on the SQL engine, so lots of nice open source projects could fit in there.
One of the big concerns for Sun is, of course, is the “Larry factor”. Releasing their own DB would piss of Oracle quite substantially (but Oracle continue to make “we like Linux” noises of their own, so no love lost there). They’d risk loosing preferred platform type status quite quickly…
But Clustra is (was?) a solid product none the less (geographically dispersed nodes anyone? Upgrade the OS without DBMS downtime anyone? All this and more with clustra was do-able), so I’m hopeful, but not without a serious dash of cynicism. They’ll probably just buy rebadge Sybase or something.
Fingers crossed though.
Update: 08/Feb/05: I’ve written up more detailed thoughts on my reasons for thinking it’s Clustra
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February 7th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Hehe – ahh good ol’ Clustra.
Maybe Sun will finally get a working JDBC driver for it too
Seriously, though, it did have some fairly unique and impressive features and there’s certainly a market for a database that scales horizontally.
February 8th, 2005 at 1:14 am
More on Sun OSDB
Stephen O’Grady writes in his linkblog : interesting post from Sequeira
October 9th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
Clustra has been renamed to HADB, and they are working on it. Search Sun’s India jobs section, and you will see a ton of jobs are for HADB.