MonetDB

MonetDB

Developer(s)	MonetDB Developer Team
Stable release	Feb2010-SP2 / April 26, 2010; 17 months ago (2010-04-26)
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	DBMS
License	MonetDB License (based on the MPL)
Website	www.monetdb.org

MonetDB is an open source column-oriented database management system developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It 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 internal data representation is memory-based, relying on the huge memory addressing ranges of contemporary CPUs using demand paging, and thus departing from traditional DBMS designs involving complex management of large data stores in limited memory.

MonetDB introduced innovations at all layers of a DBMS (see the MonetDB publications): a storage model based on vertical fragmentation, a modern CPU-tuned 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, etc. ^[1][2]

The MonetDB family consists of:

• MonetDB/SQL: the relational database solution
• MonetDB/GIS: Simple Features extension to MonetDB/SQL
• MonetDB/XQuery: the XML database solution
• MonetDB Server: the multi-model database server

History

MonetDB (initially only called Monet) was first created by Peter A. Boncz and Martin L. Kersten as part of the MAGNUM research project at University of Amsterdam.^[3] The first version under an Open Source license (a modified version of the Mozilla Public License) was released on September 30, 2004.^[4]

See also

• List of relational database management systems
• Database management system
• Column-oriented DBMS

References

1. ^ #S. Manegold. An Empirical Evaluation of XQuery Processors. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Performance and Evaluation of Data Management Systems (ExpDB), Chicago, IL, USA, June 2006.
2. ^ P. A. Boncz, T. Grust, M. van Keulen, S. Manegold, J. Rittinger, J. Teubner. MonetDB/XQuery: A Fast XQuery Processor Powered by a Relational Engine. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Chicago, IL, USA, June 2006.
3. ^ P. A. Boncz. Monet: A Next-Generation DBMS Kernel For Query-Intensive Applications. Ph.D. Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2002.
4. ^ Release Notes for Version 4.4.0

External links

Science related:

• Scientific papers

MonetDB related:

• Official homepage of MonetDB
• MonetDB on SourceForge
• MonetDB's DBD driver for the Perl DBI
• In-depth technical information about MonetDB
• Pathfinder, the relational XQuery compiler that provides XQuery functionality for MonetDB

XQuery/XPath related:

• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
• XQuery Update Facility
• XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0

GUI tools for MonetDB/XQuery:

• DbVisualizer
• iSQL viewer
• Aqua Data Studio

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.