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November 18, 2003

Virtualize This!

Since E. F. Codd, databases have prospered with virtualization. Will it continue?

by David Stodder

On September 22, at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, friends, relatives, and former colleagues of Dr. Edgar F. Codd gathered for "an afternoon of tribute and celebration" of his life and work. The greatest legacy left behind by Codd, who passed away on April 18, 2003, is of course the relational model, "a staggeringly original work that set the entire field of database management on a solid footing," in the words of Chris Date. "We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude. He laid the groundwork for a technology that has had, and continues to have a tremendous societal impact."

Led by Dr. Codd's wife, Sharon, and in the presence of his surviving family, the afternoon offered speeches full of anecdotes and remembrances that were moving, insightful, and sometimes humorous. I, too, remember Codd's dry and provocative wit. Date cited that when Codd received the high honor of becoming an IBM Fellow, he said, "This is the first time I recall somebody being made an IBM Fellow for somebody else's product."

With a bit of humor, Codd reminded everyone that there was a difference between his model and the implementations that followed, including IBM's own, which has now matured into DB2 Universal Database. Codd, Date, and their colleagues over the years played an enormously important although perhaps ultimately frustrating role in persuading relational database product developers and implementers to exploit the full power of the model and not stray from its precepts.

In the early 1980s, customer demand propelled extremely rapid growth in the relational database software market, resulting in a mad rush to get products out that could meet (or at least promise to meet) business requirements for speed, availability, reliability, and data access. The products had to fit with existing operating environments and the legacy knowledge and experience of largely mainframe-based IT managers, developers, and programmers. Then, from the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, relational databases rode the growth curve of midrange and then client/server computing, where brand new information technology customers presented distinctly different technology and product packaging requirements than on the mainframe.

Virtual Gifts

Somehow, the power of the relational idea never wavered through all these changes. On the contrary, the strength of the idea became even clearer as distributed computing became a reality. Codd's ultimate gift may be that he demonstrated how systems could separate physical and logical layers, thereby freeing both to exploit innovations, including those that could dramatically reduce cost. The relational model itself delivered much more than this, of course: but Codd's work enabled database management to be the first major software system that could thrive in a multilayered world.

Today, one of the key concepts afoot in the database industry is "virtualization." The notion of moving up a level of abstraction to encompass differences among individual elements that you want to perceive as unified is in many ways the essence of software innovation. In data management, virtualization is maturing to address the dark side of what the rapid growth in databases has delivered: a heterogeneous array of systems that hinder companies from gaining full value from their information resources.

IBM has led the database industry with the development of a federated approach, a scheme that lets the data live where it lives, focusing attention instead on a global, optimized data access and query capability. DB2 Information Integrator is IBM's key offering. Federation is architecturally important to how IBM brings together disparate data sources, including unstructured content.

Oracle, with its Real Application Clusters (RAC) introduced with the 9i release, is attempting to virtualize data management at a different level. Oracle believes its shared disk approach answers what customers really want in terms of a unified view, especially for transaction processing applications — and especially given technology trends in storage networks and grid computing built with "blade" servers. The innovations in Oracle's 10g release build on the company's assessment of underlying hardware and storage directions — and the options available in aligning Oracle's technology with these trends.

"Rather than making static ties that determine where a database physically locates its data or which exact server the database runs on," writes Oracle's Brajesh Goyal in a white paper available at Oracle's Web site, "virtualization enables each component of the grid to react to changing circumstances more quickly and to adapt to component failures without compromising performance of the system as a whole."