Robert Hodges, Continuent | PerconaLive 2014
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 03/04/2014

Robert Hodges, Continuent, at PerconaLive 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly

@thecube #theCUBE #PerconaLive #Continuent #SiliconANGLE #Percona 

At this week's #PerconaLive event, SiliconANGLE's theCUBE welcomed Robert Hodges for his first appearance to discuss how the company he helms as CEO, Continuent, has been working with the MySQL community to affect better and more effective clustering and replication solutions for larger companies that employ the open source database.

Principal research coordinator at Wikibon, Jeff Kelly asked Hodges to give his thoughts on just where MySQL fits into the current database paradigm. "It is the premier online transaction processing platform," Hodges replied. "We are looking at emergent databases like Mongo and Cassandra. But MySQL is still in the running and very vibrant."

Jeff Frick, General Manager of SiliconANGLE's theCUBE turned the conversation toward Hadoop, noting an increase in coverage for the analytics platform recently. "Tell us about the Hadoop buzz and where MySQL fits in."

MySQL, he assured Frick, is not losing stature in the market. "It's that more databases are coming up as there is a wider variety and more data being processed," Hodges stated. "The Hadoop development is interesting because it is changing the way people are doing analytics and it can do it with any type of data. People are using Hadoop as a way to aggregate sensor information to weblogs to business transactions in one place where they can compare them and gain insight."

Hadoop's strength is that it allows for the processing of enormous amounts of data. Hodges noted, "It is architected in a way to let people save money on both storage and processing." Continuent very early on anticipated the need MySQL users would develop for Hadoop. "We have customers that are coming to us now and asking us to help them do just that."

Another strength of the multiform data analytics tool is that it has, according to Hodges, changed the equation for the development of data warehouses. "With Hadoop, it is far simpler to load data than was possible previously. And you can begin evaluating that data far sooner."

Prior to the culmination of the conversation, Kelly asked Hodges to detail the business model established for Continuent in the open source community. "Our approach is to first of all be very, very careful," Hodges explained. "A lot of well known companies have gone broke putting too much in to open source. We realized that clustering is IP and licensable." He continued, "Replication is where we make our contributions to open source. That was the hook that would get people interested in our company and take a closer look at our clustering."

Following up, Frick asked what the instigating factor was that caused Continuent to present replication to the open source community over clustering. "We tried every other option first," Hodges stated wryly. "We evolved to it because we wanted to release to our open source with something that was complete."

Continuent's replication software is fairly complex. Even so, there are instances where developers have forked the code and written new features. Typically, changes made are enacted after feedback to Continuent from the community.

The roster of clients that currently rely on Continuent is impressive and speaks to their ability to provide top-notch clustering and replication that is able to yield service that, for their clients, is never down. The coming year will see the company putting more focus into Hadoop as a potential driver of additional value for their customers.