MonetDB

MonetDB is an open source high-performance database system developed at CWI, the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science Research of The Netherlands.

MonetDB project was designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, e.g. combining tables with hundreds of columns and multi-million rows.

As such, MonetDB can be used in application areas that because of performance issues are no-go areas for using traditional database technology in a real-time manner.

MonetDB has been successfully applied in high-performance applications for data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, text and multimedia retrieval.

MonetDB achieves this goal using innovations at all layers of a DBMS: a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned vectorized query execution architecture that often gives MonetDB a more than 10-fold raw speed advantage on the same algorithm over a typical interpreter-based RDBMS.

MonetDB is one of the first database systems to focus its query optimization effort on exploiting CPU caches. MonetDB also features automatic and self-tuning indexes, run-time query optimization, a modular software architecture, etcetera.

In-depth information on the technical innovations in the design and implementation of MonetDB can be found in our digital library.

Features:

• A fairly extensive ANSI SQL-99 language interface including:
• Primary and foreign key enforcement
• View management
• Sub-queries
• Authorization scheme
• Unicode support (UTF-8)
• Support for external functions
• A full-fledged and scalable implementation of XQuery.
• SQL and XQuery query caching to speed up data processing.
• Extensible architecture at any level of sophistication needed.
• The MonetDB engine can be embedded into your application.
• High performance, using highly tuned data structures and algorithms to exploit the power of modern hardware.
• Transaction control at various levels of granularity, which makes query dominant applications run at light speed.
• Tapping into the experiences gained in supporting XML, Multimedia, GIS, etc. applications right op top of a kernel without the overhead often encountered in SQL-based systems.
• Broad hardware spectrum ranging from StrongARM-based PDAs up to Opteron-based Servers (cf. Platforms).
• 32- and 64-bit cross-platform support for:
• Linux, Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, and SGI IRIX;

What is new in this release:

• Build Environment:
• We can now build RPMs on CentOS 6.0. Since there is no geos library on CentOS, we do not support the geom modules there.
• We can now also build on Fedora 15. This required some very minor changes.
• Changed configure check for OpenSSL so that we can also build on CentOS 5.6. We now no longer demand that OpenSSL is at least version 0.9.8f, but instead we require that the hash functions we need are supported.
• Client Package:
• Fix stethoscope's mod.fcn filter when using multiple targets, bug #2827
• The separate Python distribution now uses the same version number as the main package.
• MonetDB Common:
• Fixed a problem where appending string BATs could cause enormous growth of the string heap. This fixes bug 2820.
• Fixes to memory detection on FreeBSD.
• Java Module:
• Return false from Statement.getMoreResults() instead of a NullPointerException when no query has been performed on the Statement yet, bug #2833
• Fixed read-only interpretation. Connection.isReadOnly now always returns false, setReadOnly now generates a warning when called with true. Partly from bug #2818
• Allow readonly to be set when autocommit is disabled as well. Bug #2818
• SQL:
• Fixed regression where the superuser password could no longer be changed, bug #2844
• Fixed incorrect insert counts.
• Fixed bug 2823: MAL exeption on SQL query with subquery in the where part.
• Redirect error from create scripts back to the first client. This fixes bug 2813.
• Added joinidx based semijoin; push join through union (using joinidx).
• Fixed pushing select down.
• Bug Fixes:
• 2058: scoping issue of functions and with
• 2734: MALException:mkey.bulk_rotate_xor_hash on complex SQL query
• 2767: `make uninstall` fails in clients/rubyadapter
• 2797: mserver crashes at initialization when the disk is full
• 2811: mserver crashes
• 2812: Subqueries in FROM clause not accepted
• 2813: SQL: catalog is built even error has occurred
• 2818: JDBC: exception on calling Connection.setReadOnly
• 2819: make text readable
• 2820: SIGSEGV in BATins_kdiff triggered by a DELETE statement
• 2821: segmentation fault when a select query (with group by) is run on server with "--single-user" option
• 2822: A query with CASE and division results in ArithmeticException
• 2823: MAL exeption on SQL query with subquery in the where part
• 2825: "Insert into ... select distinct ..." fails with MALException:mkey.bulk_rotate_xor_hash:operation
• 2826: sql function iterates instead of bulk processing
• 2827: Incorrect filter setting when listening to several servers
• 2829: logging issue
• 2830: select 30.0 - 0.025; conversion to decimal type gives error
• 2831: Crash in query analysis
• 2832: Server terminates upon UPDATE
• 2833: NullPointerException when calling getMoreResults() on Statement without a query executed
• 2835: UNIQUE Constraint is not enforced
• 2837: Server terminates after CREATE FUNCTION in multi-user scenario
• 2844: ALTER USER SET PASSWORD doesn't recognise username

What is new in version Nov2008-SP1:

• The release solves a nasty deadlock problem in concurrent updates of XQuery documents.
• The client interface has been improved.
• A dozen minor bugs were solved.

What is new in version Nov2008:

• This release features improved memory management, intra-query optimizers for multi-core processing, parallel data loading, and SQL and XQuery bugfixes.