The world is full of many great database engines, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle – the list goes on and on, and in fact is growing rapidly. Now with new advances there are a plethora of NoSQL and high-performance in-memory database engines as well. The recent interest in products like MemDB, Redis, HSQL, and others have spurred an entirely new era of database management, allowing developers more freedom than ever before. Plus historically, database management has been tightly linked with caching technologies like MemcacheD, and entirely different type of database engine, used for short-lived in-memory data access.

One key factor in using or evaluating any of these database products is that “one size does not fit all.” In fact, the “SQL or NoSQL” (see SQL or NoSQL? by Cory Isaacson)  question is becoming more prevalent, being asked by an increasing group of sharp developers – developers who demand the most in performance, scalability and reliability from their database infrastructure.

Each of these database engines have their individual strengths (and weaknesses), and we are finding the need among our customers to use and manage a combination of database technologies to fully optimize their application.

In truth, developers need to pick and use “the best tool for the job.”  This is especially true for existing applications, where you may be using a traditional SQL database now, and want to migrate some or all of your functionality to a NoSQL or in-memory engine for greatly improved performance.

So, if you end up using multiple database technologies, how about managing an integrated environment? Each of these database engines needs certain critical management capabilities to ensure success:

-       Scalability through Database Sharding

-       High Availability through Reliable Replication and Failover

-       Monitoring, management for routine tasks like backup, restore, performance optimization

Truthfully, these capabilities are the most critical for your database tier, regardless of technology – and the most difficult to deliver and get right. Each independent product is attempting to add these capabilities, resulting in “lock in” to a given database engine technology, a management nightmare, and putting you at the mercy of each vendor’s actual capabilities and deficiencies.

Or put another way, with a world full of great database engines, how will you make it all work together?

dbShards is a unique product, a complete suite of database agnostic tools and management facilities to deliver these critical features to your entire database tier, in a seamless, Application-Aware manner. dbShards gives you the control you need to optimize, replicate, and scale your entire database manager layer, from the driver level to managing the database engine. The product is proven through years of development and incredibly strenuous testing in live 24X7 applications – applications that “live or die” based on database performance and reliability.

dbShards provides these critical features, needed for every type of database engine:

-       dbShards/Client: Using the dbShards/Client, you can accomplish full scalability and high availability direct from your application. There is no “middle tier” or “proxy” that you need to install or manage as your application connects directly to the database engine. Not only is this easier, its faster and more reliable too – nothing stands between your application runtime and your database. We currently support plug-compatible dbShards/Client drivers for MySQL, JDBC, and soon to be many more.

-       dbShards/Replicate: dbShards/Replicate uses our patent-pending Out of Band replication technology, simply the fastest method we know of for reliable database transaction replication. dbShards/Replicate can replication transactions for any type of database engine, with incredible performance – ensuring fault tolerance with true “active-active” operation across two or more database servers. dbShards/Replicate also seamlessly supports Fail Down in the event of a system outage, and planned Failover for routine maintenance tasks.

-       dbShards/Scale: When you need to scale your database engine, dbShards/Scale provides incredibly high-performance Database Sharding  capabilities. dbShards/Scale is Application-Aware, meaning that you get to optimize  your sharding strategy for your application. dbShards/Scale allows you to re-shard without downtime, plus it offers our incredibly efficient “Go Fish” parallel query capability (see full dbShards Whitepaper).

In short, dbShards helps you to manage, scale and maintain your entire database infrastructure, with one or many database engines. Using dbShards you avoid lock-in to a single technology, and have the flexibility to “mix and match” according to your application’s specific needs.

Find out more about why our customers have selected dbShards (Familybuilder).

We also offer our free dbShards/Analyze driver. Just plug it in to your application, and it collects all pertinent database access statistics for your application.