|
Sponsored Links
Resources
Enterprise Java
Research Library
Get Java white papers, product information, case studies and webcasts
|
News
News
News
|
Messages: 25
Messages: 25
Messages: 25
Printer friendly
Printer friendly
Printer friendly
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
XML
XML
XML
|
 |
Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
What are the differences between two of the largest Java run-time data caching and computational grid products? Gojko Adzic worked with both technologies over a year and presents an unbiased analysis of both that will help you understand their differences and advantages to assist your selection of one technology over the other for a specific problem domain.
The article provides a thorough comparison of both products in these areas:
- Data caching
- Processing
- Persistence
- Scaling
- Deployment
Neither technology is favoured over the other in this presentation. The author presents each's strengths and weaknesses, and provides enough information to help someone decide based on functional requirements.
|
|
|
Message #309864
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
It's not a bad writeup on Gojko's part, although he gets the notification mechanism on GigaSpaces wrong; he also oversimplifies his conclusion somewhat IMO (although I do agree on general principles.)
Terracotta is an interesting comparison project to these two. (This was brought up in the comments, as was a correction to the GigaSpaces notification mechanism.) To me, TC offers a similar solution to Coherence, albeit transparently to the client code; that said, I doubt I'm the normal DSO user.
|
|
|
Message #309867
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Gigaspaces deploys data to a fixed number partitions and fixes it for the lifetime of the data space. If a machine goes down, a backup partition will take over and on clouds you can even have a new machine instance started up for you automatically, but you cannot increase or decrease the number of partitions after the grid has started.
This is not really true, at least I don't remember this being a constraint, it's been a year since I last touched GS. Out system was able to deploy more data partitions on different nodes on the fly and the data got repartitioned/moved around when we added and/or removed nodes. This was a big requirement for us, as we needed to deploy on EC2 and scale the grid up and down during the week for scalability and cost reasons and GS handled it very well.
I do remember that this configuration wasn't that straight forward, I think you had to set the maximum number of nodes you could allow in the grid and you can scale up to that number.
Maybe someone from GS team and/or Joe can comment on that.
|
|
|
Message #309869
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
I'm not 100% sure, but I think that trick goes like this:
Deploy 15 partitions to 5 machines. If you see that the partitions are using too much memory (using for example a SLA) you can get a new machine and "migrate" some partitions to that new machine. Therefore you can grow from 5 machines to 15.
So the sentence should be "the number of partitions is fixed, but not the number of machines"
|
|
|
Message #309876
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
I'm not 100% sure, but I think that trick goes like this ..
Or in upcoming GridGain 3.0 just say to add 3 more instances on the cloud:
GridFactory.getGrid().controlCloud(3, "ec2", "my-image");
Regards,
--
Nikita Ivanov
GridGain - Open Cloud Platform
|
|
|
Message #309877
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
You are right Pablo.
See this for details:
http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/SBP/Capacity+Planning
Adding to Shay, Pablo and Ilia ...
You can see my detailed response on that regard to this specific point:
"As far as i know this is the same with both products only that we explicit partition instances and Coherence uses implicit logical partitions. In both cases dynamic scaling would be changing the number of running partitions per JVM container (GSC in our terminology). You can start with 100 of partitions even if you have two machines and spread those partitions as soon there are more resource available. When a machine unit goes down the system will not wait till a new machine becomes available - it will scale down to the existing containers as long as it detects that there is enough memory and CPU capacity available. I’m not sure how scaling down works with coherence but one thing to check is whether there scaling down could lead to out of memory issues in case there is not enough capacity on the available machines.
I would refer to the main difference between the two approaches as black-box(Coherence) vs White-box (GS). In our philosophy clustering behavior should be managed in the same consistent way across the entire application stack which means that when we manage a partition or when we scale the application we scale not just the data but the business logic and messaging and any other component that needs to be associated with that. Our experience showed the the black-box approach is simpler to get started with but can be fairly complex once you start to deal with scaling on other layers of the application such as the business logic, messaging layer or the web layer. In many cases this leads to different clustering models across the application tiers which leads to more moving parts and complexity etc. For example in our case if a data grid container or a web container crashes the process of maintaining their high availability would be exactly the same.
As of XAP 7.0 release we also added the ability for users to write their own custom SLA and scaling behavior melodramatically - See reference here
This will enable you to monitor the entire application behavior and decide what threshold should trigger scaling out or down, automate the entire deployment and manage self-healing when there is a failure.
This wouldn’t be possible if we would have taken the black-box approach."
Based on the comment in a followup response by one Coherence users my assumption seem to be accurate:
Coherence’s partition count is also fixed and cannot be changed while the cluster is running
Nati S
GigaSpaces
|
|
|
Message #309880
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Since cloud API been mentioned…
With GigaSpaces Cloud Computing Framework (CCF), you don’t just add instances on the cloud in dynamic manner , you deploy complete end-to-end application. Within a single click/ API call / Command you start machines on the cloud , deploy HTTP load-balancers , deploy web servers , deploy databases , deploy data grid and deploy your services. You can scale dynamically every tier of your application (not only the Data-Grid or the Compute-Grid!), and survive any failure of the system components (not just the data-grid). CCF allows you to run multiple instances of your application simultaneously or different versions to co-exists side-by-side. For more details see:
http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/CCF/CCF4XAP+Documentation+Home
If you are looking for a nice example how GigaSpaces can scale any tier of the application in dynamic manner see how GigaSpaces can scale Mule based application (plus also make it totally resilient with continuous high-availability):
http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/SBP/Mule+ESB+Example
Shay
|
|
|
Message #309881
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Melodramatic?
Nati,
This is the first time I'm seeing it in such context :)
scaling behavior melodramatically...
Oops...
It should have been:
As of XAP 7.0 release we also added the ability for users to write their own custom SLA and scaling behavior dynamically - See reference here
Nikita thanks for pointing this out ..
Nati S.
GigaSpaces
|
|
|
Message #309892
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Nati,
All I know is that I can download Coherence, unzip it, and start up 100 (or 200, etc.) machines running it without changing the config, and it will automatically and dynamically scale out the data management across those machines, and it's worked that way for seven years now. (You probably remember that we pioneered the concept, since copied with varying success by a few dozen open source and commercial packages, including memcached and gigaspaces.)
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java, .NET and C++
|
|
|
Message #309893
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
A rather unfortunate title. I've written many articles (here) and talked about these two technologies over the years but I would never put one up against the other like that.
I think Cameron (CTO and founder of Tangosol) and Nati (CTO and founder of GigaSpaces) would be the first two agree, firstly that their technology is undoubtedly the best but secondly that they are both very different in their approach and problems they solve.
Comparing these two in the same space has about as much logic as comparing C++ and Java, there's an overlap but they are both specialist tools that solve different problems.
I've always sought a good reference that uses both technologies to demonstrate their differences and how they could be made to complement each other but sadly most banks (where they're most widely used) tend to have one or the other and rarely both. Of course I'd have to add Gemstone and Terracotta to the list in this regard and may be even Hazelcast and GridGain. It's interesting now that because some of the banks have merged recently the technologies have in fact been forced together but the winning choice is usually a political one as managers compete for the remaining jobs.
I find it difficult to think of a server-side application without thinking in terms of the master-worker pattern and obviously GigaSpaces fits that beautifully, on the other hand it's difficult to imagine scaling a cache or persistence layer without Coherence.
-John-
|
|
|
Message #309929
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Cameron
I never argued that the world wouldn't exist before Coherence came to the world. I'm sure that you believe in it and if that is the case I'm happy for you. I didn't even argued that Coherence is easier to get started with (My comments explicitly talks about that).
Having said that dealing with dynamic scaling requires that you would consider things like:
1. What if i mistakenly started a new instance - would that trigger re balancing? In many cases i would like to control when re balancing happens. What options do i have to do that?
2. What if i want to make sure that backup and primaries will be spread between primary and disaster recovery sites i.e. that primaries and backup will not exist in the same data center even if they are running on two separate machines.
3. If my data partition fails over how do i handle fail-over of the business logic that is attached to it.
4. What if i need to scale down - what will happen to my data if a machines goes down and the existing machines are already at full capacity?
5. How do i know where every piece of my data is running and when it moves where to? Sometimes I'll need to trigger other activities as a result of such event, how do i do that?
These are just few of the questions that one would need to consider when choosing between the two approaches. We tend to believe that giving control and visibility is core even if it comes at a cost of initial user experience (And were making continues progress to keep that cost at minimum).
Anyway if you'll compare the two approaches I'm sure that you'll see quite a difference in the philosophy and obviously the implementation behind it. I'm not sure that the two of us are the best Judges to decide which one is better as there is clearly pros and cons in each approach and they both seem to be successful.
Nati S
GigaSpaces
|
|
|
Message #309934
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
John,
You bring up some good points. Not only is it an unfortunate title, the discussion itself obscures the fact that there are other products like GemFire, which have been widely adopted in financial services and other verticals and are used on a daily basis in grid computing environments where scaling down is as important as scaling up.
It also obscures the fact that automatically moving data around without taking into account the workload and the kind of data that is active at the time the new capacity becomes available, (or goes away) can create more problems.
Jags points to approaches taken by GemFire in his recent blog post here
Nati does highlight something important in that anytime you move beyond a laptop based POC into deployments and go into hundreds of servers, explict user control and policy driven scaling do play an important role, and I know for a fact that GemFire uses that approach to scaling, redundancy recovery, balancing out partitions etc., with reasonable defaults.
Integrating the master-worker pattern into distributed data management products like GemFire, Giga, Coherence etc. has certainly been one of the more innovative things in this space (Off course it is a matter of debate whether god commanded a CTO to do so first and the others just followed, but we can leave that out for now ) and even here, dynamic policy driven rebalancing which takes into account all of the current workload on the cluster is what provides the most optimal performance
I think a data container that is capable of linear scale and an implementation of a data aware master-worker pattern are integral parts of any first class product in this space, and being good at one or the other is necessary but not sufficient. GemFire certainly provides both of these. You don't have to take my word for it. You can read the details on the community portal
Cheers
Sudhir Menon
GemFire:The Enterprise Data Fabric
|
|
|
Message #309984
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Hey Nati,
I think we all agree with one thing. These products, like other Data Grid products, often have very different philosophies, vastly different implementation strategies and definitely different terminology. The differences often out number the similarities so much so it's basically pointless trying to compare small technical features (let's call them "knobs"), even when those "knobs" have exactly the same "names". eg: a Replicated Cache in Coherence is not the same as a Replicated Cache in Gemstone's Gemfire.
As there are few standards in this space and given that no one will admit to copying ideas, what applies to Gigaspaces (or some other product) does not necessarily apply to Coherence and/or vice-versa. Thus comparing "knobs" is only useful when the "knobs" are at least similar and have the same function (or unless one has a fascination with "knobs")
Your statement;
Coherence’s partition count is also fixed and cannot be changed while the cluster is running
clearly demonstrates this point. It's pretty clear that you don't not understand how Coherence manages "partitions", their purpose and/or how customers use it.
Please don't think for any moment that your statements are a limitation/weakness of Coherence compared to Gigaspaces or any other implementation. Time and time again this has been proved not to be the case. Unfortunately Gigaspaces (and associated sales/partners etc), continue to bring it up as a big thing. I'm guessing it's to gain some form of leverage... Fair enough. If that's the case it's called competition. But let's at least be clear about it up front about it. Your knowledge is very limited in this area with respect to Coherence. Making the statement bold does not increase your authority on the matter.
You're correct though. When using Coherence out-of-the-box, the partition count for an individual Partition Service is set to a default (you can call it fixed if you like). What you fail to mention (possibly deliberately, possibly because you don't know, possibly because you don't want anyone to know) is that in Coherence;
a). Partitions are not bound to individual servers.
ie: you can and typically have more partitions than there are physical or virtual servers in a cluster. Coherence works out how best to allocate and manage partitions so that in the event that a server is lost, no information is lost... something I believe that most data grid vendors (apart from Oracle) still require the developers to understand and/or manually manage carefully (or it's done via some proxy/GUI wizard). Fundamentally this means the "intelligence" is being provided by the "developer" as it's not "built into" the product.
b). The number of partitions by default in Coherence is pretty high (257 partitions) when compared with all other products.
ie: Coherence doesn't suggest or force an initial model where there is "one partition per server". So unlike most products (and I think Gigaspaces is like this) where when you start a 3 server system, you end up with a correlated number of partitions (ie: 3 partitions), Coherence is different. Coherence by default starts with a suitably high number of partitions, even if you have just one server! Consequently if you add another server to a Coherence Cluster (at runtime without requiring a GUI) you don't force developers/operations people to start thinking about reconfiguring partitions (until you go past 257, but then again that is a deployment decision, not one that limits the number of servers in a cluster). ie: You can have a cluster much larger that the partition count and sometimes this is actually desirable!
The thing is this: Why would anyone put developers in a position where they have to continually re-configure/re-partition their data when servers join/leave a cluster? It just makes "operational scalability" a pain and error prone. I guess this is why so many products in this space require GUIs, just to start them. The infrastructure should be able to at least do this for you. We'll that's our belief. See... a different philosophy.
c). The Partitioned "Services", which make use of partition count and other information are dynamically re-loadable and thus dynamically configurable (if you really must) - it's just that almost no one does this as the defaults are often sufficient! Why change something if there is no need? Why make it harder to use?
d). Part of pre-production check list is setting partition counts to a suitable level so that you don't have to change it. Again most people never change past the default.
e). Partitions are only used to organize information and are not related to capacity.
f). Having more partitions than the server count is often a very good thing. Increases parallelism and makes better use of multi-core systems!
Think of it this way: Developers using out-of-the-box Coherence can comfortably scale a system up or down (dynamically on the fly) from 1 to 257 servers (physical or virtual, cloud or no cloud) without a GUI and without even thinking about partitions or requiring some console to manage this. While I think this is a good thing, others may disagree. For small systems (with just a few servers) it's trivial to manage servers, with large systems (10's, 100's or 1000's of servers spread around the world), the last thing you want to do is stuff around with partitions (or remember too).
Having;
a). Been a Coherence customer for nearly 4 years (in a variety of positions and companies)
b). To evaluate all of these products, including Gigaspaces (in that time)
c). Personally assisted several Gigaspaces customers in the past few years to migrate onto Coherence (for various technical and business reasons, scalability being one)
d). Worked with some of the largest Gigaspaces customers (they told me)
e). Talked to/with probably thousands engineers about Coherence and partition management
I can honestly say no one has ever found partition count configuration with Coherence to be a drop dead issue, especially previous Gigaspaces customers.
Regards
-- Brian
Global Solutions Architect
Oracle Coherence
(and former customer)
|
|
|
Message #310021
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Brian
You got me lost a bit.
It looks to me that that you either misinterpreted large part of my previous comments or that I didn't made myself clear enough. Let me try again:
The points I was trying to make are:
1. Both products support dynamic clustering
2. Both products use a fixed number of logical partitions and change the number of those partitions between the available JVM's.
The main difference between the two approaches toward dynamic scaling are:
1. Coherence performs the migration of logical partitions implicitly when ever a new JVM joins the cluster - a user have no control or visibility as to where each partition is running and when it is moving. I referred to this model as the blackbox approach.
2. GigaSpaces on the other-hand uses a generic container model and enable either automatic re-location of partitions between containers based on user defined SLA (Memory, CPU etc) or even manually.
The areas in which those differences becomes important is in area's that i pointed out earlier such as in cases where you want to keep primary and backup separate between disaster recovery sites etc. I didn't quite got your view as to how Coherence can handle any of those scenarios. I'll appreciate if you could elaborate on that in case i missed something.
The comment about the fixed number of partitions was actually a quote from a Coherence user on the original post.
You seem to mistakenly interpret that as an attempt to point to a limitation of Coherence. What i was saying is that we use that exact model - I therefore found your entire argument, Justifying why fixed number of partitions is a good thing quite amusing as we don't really have an argument there.
One last comment: If that wasn't clear the writer of this article selected GigaSpaces at the end of the day to run his application. You can read the details of his selection in his direct response.
If I'll need to summarize his comment then i would put it in the following way:
Coherence and GigaSpaces provides first of class Data-Grid solution. For pure caching scenarios Coherence seem to be simpler to use. For distributed transaction processing in which data-grid is part of the solution GigaSpaces is a better fit as we provides a more complete solution due to the native Space Based Architecture support.
Nati S
GigaSpaces
|
|
|
Message #310060
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Nati -
Coherence performs the migration of logical partitions implicitly when ever a new JVM joins the cluster - a user have no control or visibility as to where each partition is running and when it is moving. I referred to this model as the blackbox approach.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I want to correct a few of your statements:
* When a new JVM that is configured to manage a certain set of partitioned data joins into a cluster that already hosts that data, then that new JVM uses a greedy algorithm to request that the other servers asynchronously transfer responsibilities to it in order to load-balance the cluster. That allows the application to keep running close to full speed while some data is migrated incrementally (and in a load balanced manner) to the new server.
* There is complete visibility to the partitioning locations. From any server at any time, it is possible to determine the number of partitions for a particular cache, the number of backups for those partitions, and the location of each partition and each synchronous replica (backup) of that partition.
* There is complete visibility to the partitioning decisions. Partitions have full life-cycle events that applications can listen and react to.
The one thing that you were correct about is that Coherence does not delegate HA decisions related to partitioning to the application code. In other words, Coherence makes partitioning decisions automotonically in order to ensure high availability at all times, and does not ask the application code to participate in those decisions. The downside to this decision is that application code cannot control which servers manage which partitions. The upside to this decision is high availability, which has always been our primary goal with Coherence (and arguably the primary reason for our market success).
Coherence and GigaSpaces provides first of class Data-Grid solution. For pure caching scenarios Coherence seem to be simpler to use. For distributed transaction processing in which data-grid is part of the solution GigaSpaces is a better fit as we provides a more complete solution due to the native Space Based Architecture support.
I chuckle at your continued attempts to denote Coherence as a caching solution. Admittedly, the overwhelming market demand (for eight years now) has been for distributed caching functionality; probably 90% or more of our deployments make at least some use of our distributed caching functionality.
An intermediate category that you missed is the "distributed data management" functionality, such as you find in HTTP session management, JMS message stores, and many other use cases.
Only a small percentage of our customers make use of the high-end Coherence Data Grid capabilities, which enable application logic and data to be collocated (data moved to logic, or logic moved to data) and executed in parallel in large-scale environments. While we have had the good fortune to be very successful in this high end data grid market, it's still relatively young (we only introduced these capabilities 4-5 years ago) and there's obviously still room for other companies like Gigaspaces to enter.
If that wasn't clear the writer of this article selected GigaSpaces at the end of the day to run his application.
Congratulations! Next time, you're buying the beer ;-)
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java, .NET and C++
|
|
|
Message #310072
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Cameron
Thanks for the detailed response ..
That was the type of information i was looking for.
When i was referring to the term Control i was referring mainly to the ability to control the cluster behavior (as appose to configuration). Maybe you can clarify the following points:
1. Is there away to control whether data migration will happen only when there is a real need for it (not when a new JVM joins the cluster)?
2. Is there away to control that primary and backup will not be provisioned on the same data-center?
3. What will happen to my data if a machines goes down and the existing machines are already at full capacity?
"If that wasn't clear the writer of this article selected GigaSpaces at the end of the day to run his application."
Congratulations! Next time, you're buying the beer ;-)
With pleasure ...
|
|
|
Message #310108
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Nati -
1. Is there away to control whether data migration will happen only when there is a real need for it (not when a new JVM joins the cluster)?
It's going to be hard to explain this to you, since Gigaspaces has such a different architecture, resembling more of a federated system (e.g. routing by the clients, a la memcached) than a cluster (a la Coherence). In Coherence, the location and load-balancing of data is performed asynchronously and transparently to the application, without data loss or corruption, and without relaxing write consistency. When a server joins the cluster and it is configured to manage data, that is what it does, so if there is "no real need for it", then the server wouldn't be there.
2. Is there away to control that primary and backup will not be provisioned on the same data-center?
Yes, but we do not suggest clustering to be used across two data centers (again, because our clustering is not just a bunch of servers federated by clients, but an actual cluster).
Our Push Replication feature is typically used instead; see the Oracle Incubator for more details. High availability across a WAN is certainly one of our main selling points for our data grid edition, since (we've been told by customers) it's the only solution for achieving HA data grids across multiple data centers.
3. What will happen to my data if a machines goes down and the existing machines are already at full capacity?
Running Gigaspaces or running Coherence? ;-)
Coherence supports off-heap storage, overflow, etc. It has for years.
Normally though you'd use an N+1 capacity plan, and (e.g. with Oracle Enterprise Manager or WebLogic Liquid Operations Control) that would ensure that there was always an extra server, even if one went down.
Honestly though, if you're running a system at full capacity, you should not be running systems .. ;-)
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java, .NET and C++
|
|
|
Message #310128
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Or
just avoid all this and buy IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale :) It's the other 'only' product that does multi-data center replication...
|
|
|
Message #310131
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Cameron
Thanks again for the detailed response.
It would be refreshing if for once you could leave your pompousic tone out.
Gigaspaces has such a different architecture, resembling more of a federated system (e.g. routing by the clients, a la memcached)
Correction: With GigaSpaces we balance between client and server side logic where load-balancing is done on the client side and replication and write-consistency is done on the serverside. The advantage of that is that we can ensure single network hop for each read operation. As for consistency, as the writer noted in his post we also support transaction integrity i.e. we will roll-back the state of all object if the trasaction fails something that the writer found lacking in the case of Coherence.
it's the only solution for achieving HA data grids across multiple data centers.
Referring to an incubator project (that is outside of your product)and saying that you provide the only solution for WAN doesn't sound convincing to me.
In any case I would encourage you to check your sources WRT to your above statement, you couldn't be more wrong than that.
with Oracle Enterprise Manager or WebLogic Liquid Operations Control) that would ensure that there was always an extra server, even if one went down
We believe cluster automation and orchestration is core and should be tightly integrated with the application and cluster management. It should also be part of your development and testing environment. I found that many of the external orchestration tools where designed for integration presupposes but are not well suited for cluster management.
Having said that it is a valid solution if your willing to carry the complexity (And cost) that is associated it.
Honestly though, if you're running a system at full capacity, you should not be running systems .. ;-)
Fair point - a better approach in such cases would be to avoid getting into potential overflow situation in the first place and just wait till there would be available resources to deal with that failure. In our case such resources would be provisioned automatically and this brings me back to the point i was making above about the importance of keeping the cluster automation and orchestration tightly integrated.
Nati S
GigaSpaces
|
|
|
Message #310134
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Nati -
It would be refreshing if for once you could leave your pompousic tone out.
Seriously, I've seen your questions at least a dozen times before. Your salesperson or salespeople feed them to potential customers all of the time as FUD. Honestly, it gets really old after a while.
Nonetheless, despite being bear-baited by you (for the n-th time :-p), you are still correct: I should have done the right thing and taken the high road in my response.
The advantage of that is that we can ensure single network hop for each read operation.
Yes, of course. I have to assume you knew that's true of Coherence.
As for consistency, as the writer noted in his post we also support transaction integrity i.e. we will roll-back the state of all object if the trasaction fails something that the writer found lacking in the case of Coherence.
First, rolling back stuff doesn't equate to consistency. Unless something has changed in the past month, Gigaspaces doesn't provide any guarantees for consistent reads across two servers, for example. (I was told that it doesn't even provide consistency guarantees across two partitions on the same server, but I've never verified that claim.)
To your point though, we do not provide XA transactions in our current product. What we do provide is once-and-only-once guarantees on operations, which enable applications to compose transactions for XTP systems (where distributed 2PC just isn't going to cut it). It's more work, but the throughput is several orders of magnitude higher.
As but one throughput example, benchmarks of distributed transactions in Gigaspaces have been pretty clearly documented. (For the record, that's 208 TPS, and in his testing, he saw a factor of 3x to 6x penalty.)
Referring to an incubator project (that is outside of your product) ..
It may be "outside" of the coherence.jar file, but it's a published project (you know, like Tomcat or Eclipse is published ;-), built by our product team and widely used by our customers for some time now.
.. saying that you provide the only solution for WAN ..
That's not exactly what I said, but I can't be any less subtle without posting a story that would qualify as FUD, so I'll humbly retract my statement and admit that I shouldn't have said it in the first place.
We believe cluster automation and orchestration is core and should be tightly integrated with the application and cluster management.
Nati, you're being disingenuous. Just point out that your product includes this capability now and you think that your product is better as a result; honestly, you don't have to pretend to be objective when you're the CTO of a competing company. I don't mind you liking your own product; in fact, I'd be a bit worried if you didn't!
.. a better approach in such cases would be to avoid getting into potential overflow situation in the first place and just wait till there would be available resources to deal with that failure. In our case such resources would be provisioned automatically ..
Yes. We have a rule-driven management engine that does just that as part of Coherence Suite (which used to be called WebLogic Application Grid).
Even before that though we've been watching customers do this for years. I'm sure you've heard of Data Synapse Fabric Server for example.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java, .NET and C++
|
|
|
Message #310180
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Cameron
I'm trying to think of a good way to close this thread.
I would start by reminding you that it all started by a statement that all other products are basically a clone of Coherence. Later you admitted that GigaSpaces is fundamentally different. You also started by touching on your strongest selling point e.g. dynamic scaling. I hope that now you realize that there is more then one way to implement this and other capabilities.
I think that the writer of this article outlines in a fairly balanced manner the strengths and weaknesses of each product based on his experience so well need to give him the credit for that.
If that wasn't clear, I wanted you and your team to know that i hold a lot of respect to you personally and to Coherence team in general. I think that the competition between the two companies leads both teams to excel and innovate and that's what competition should do. I do hope that we will all learn to take the "high road" and keep a constructive dialogue. After all we all have things to learn from each other and as you could see there is always more then one way to approach a given requirement. That in itself shouldn't hold any of us from claiming that "our own high road" is better then the other:)
One other thing that cross my mind while writing those lines is that the timing might be right to start thinking of standardizing the Data Grid semantics and API....
Have a great weekend
Nati S
GigaSpaces
P.S your argument on consistency and transaction support in GigaSpaces is incorrect for the most part, I'll leave that statement open ended right now otherwise will continue dragging each other through this endless discussion.
|
|
|
Message #310196
Post reply
Post reply
Post reply
Go to top
Go to top
Go to top
|
|
Re: Oracle Coherence vs. GigaSpaces XAP
Nati -
I would start by reminding you that it all started by a statement that all other products are basically a clone of Coherence.
Not to be argumentative, but I was responding to what I considered to be your inane quoting and bolding (and thank God not ALL CAPS-ING) of irrelevant information about Coherence that seemed to serve no purpose other than FUD.
Going back to my response, I simply pointed out that we pioneered the concept of the dynamically partitioned HA data grid. If I'm wrong, I'm certain you could post a link to show otherwise (Ari for example claims that he built it all himself in college in 1994, and mentioned that Parc had it all in the 1970s, which is pretty definitive proof in and of itself if you ask me ;-). Note that we didn't patent it. We didn't threaten to sue you for doing something similar. I really don't understand what's so evil about coming up with something interesting and being proud of having done so. I hope you are as proud of the things that you've built.
Later you admitted that GigaSpaces is fundamentally different.
Nati, I honestly don't see a contradiction here. Don't you think that the architecture of Gigaspaces is fundamentally different?
I think that the competition between the two companies leads both teams to excel and innovate ..
On this, you and I have always agreed. The competition has certainly not hurt Coherence sales, and I assume (based on the 25+ competitors that have entered the space since 2001) that the overall market is growing and doing pretty well.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java, .NET and C++
|
|
|
| New content on TheServerSide.comNew content on TheServerSide.comNew content on TheServerSide.com |
|
|
Reza Rahman explores the features of the proposed JSR 299, Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI). When approved, it promises to be a key feature of Java EE 6.
(November 2, Article)
SAML is an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. The single most important problem that SAML was created to solve is the Web browser Single Sign-On problem. Many organizations are debating whether to stay with version 1.1 or move to 2.0. This article makes observations about both options.
(September 28, Article)
Joe Ottinger takes a look at how people learn, and applies it to the practice of programming. He notes that understanding how people learn is an essential part of working in a programming team.
(September 22, Article)
Stephen Maryka gave us an article about the Asynchronous Web and posed a number of questions that get examined like an approach to delivering Asynchronous Web capabilities through extensions to existing Java EE technologies.
(July 14, Article)
JavaServer Faces Flex goal is to provide users capability in creating standard Flex components, part of flexSDK which is open sourced through MPL license, as normal JSF components. This article by Ji Hoon Kim will provide an overview of creating a simple multilingual JSF page consisting of JSF Flex tags.
(June 29, Article)
In this session Jeff explores the key characteristics of successful SOA projects. He covers some of the patterns, and anti-patterns, tool sets, and strategies that he himself learned the hard way. Last, he provides a strategy and blueprint for achieving a high likelihood of success in your SOA project.
(June 23, Tech Talk)
Ari Zilka, CTO of Terracotta, Inc., talks about the new features in Terracotta 3.1, announced during JavaOne and available now.
(June 15, Tech Talk)
In this Tech Talk, Josh Long explores an integration challenge using Spring Integration and walks through the implementation, employing and expanding on the basic patterns of Enterprise Application Integration to tie together components into a function integration solution, and then demonstrates how Spring Integration helps address the integration requirements.
(June 15, Tech Talk)
In this Tech Talk, David Geary teaches you: The basics of Google Web Toolkit; How to implement Ajax-enabled applications in Java; Internationalization; Hooking into the browser history mechanism; Remote procedure calls.
(June 4, Tech Talk)
Jon Kern discusses the best architecture/technical solutions and ensure that they are repeated by all developers. By tackling the architecture up-front in a serial manner, subsequent parallel development will be much more manageable and predictable.
(May 28, Tech Talk)
This keynote describes the frustrations of modern knowledge workers in their quest to actually get some work done, and solutions for how to guard yourself against all those distractions. Neal Ford talks about environments, coding, acceleration, automation, and avoiding repetition as ways to defeat the misguided attempts to sap your ability to produce good work.
(May 26, Tech Talk)
Gil demonstrates how new, aggressive uses of already abundant compute capacity by common applications offer competitive value for application designers.
(May 21, Tech Talk)
Chris Keene introduces WaveMaker as a new way to automate the ability to generate Hibernate classes in order to more quickly bring OR mapping into an application.
(May 19, Article)
In this session Nati Shalom demonstrates how to take a standard Java EE web application and scale it out or down dynamically without changes to the application code. Seeing as most web applications are over-provisioned to meet infrequent peak loads, this is a dramatic change because it enables growing your application as needed, when needed, without paying for unutilized resources.
(May 19, Tech Talk)
Mastering EJB was one of the original and most influential EJB books in the industry. Mastering EJB III now returns with two new expert co-authors, updated for EJB 2.1 and 30% new chapters including security, integration, best practices, open source, and more.
(Book PDF Download)
The Application Server Matrix is a detailed listing of J2EE vendors and their application server products, with information on latest version numbers, J2EE spec support and licensing, pricing, platform support, and links to product downloads and reviews.
(Application Server Comparison Matrix)
|
|
