Brief notes are summaries of briefings and conversations I’ve had, with only light “analysis.”
The venerable Toad database tool line launched a “cloud” version last year, allowing users to work with NoSQL and cloud-based databases such as SimpleDB, Cassandra, SQL Azure, and Hadoop among others. In the relational database world, Toad has always been an good choice for messing around with databases so it makes sense for Quest Software to extend into the NoSQL world.
While I still don’t feel like there’s massive “mainstream” adoption of NoSQL databases, interest in new types of databases (“NoSQL” for unprecise shorthand) is certainly high and there’s enough “real” uses in the wild. RedMonk has certainly been fielding a lot of inquires on the topic as well and in-depth research notes on selecting NoSQL databases for various clients.
Thus far, Toad for Cloud Databases has 2,000+ “active users,” which is pretty good given the level of “real” NoSQL usage we’ve been anecdotatly seeing at RedMonk. As Christian Hasker (Director of Product Management) said, Hadoop tends to lead the pack, and then there’s a “sharp drop-off” to other database types.
In addition to tooling, Quest is building itself up as a “trusted voice” in the NoSQL-hungry world with community efforts like the NoSQLPedia, which actually has been doing a good job cataloging all the new databases, as in their survey of distributed databases.
For Quest, it of course makes sense to chase tooling here. They’ve maintained a huge install-base for their relational database tools and as new types of databases emerge and become popular, keeping their community (paying customers and non-paying users) well-tooled is important. Also, applying my cynical theory of “make a mess, charge to clean up the mess,” the rest of Quest has and could have plenty to sell when it comes to managing all those “cloud databases” in the wild. As an early, non-Quest, example of a janitor here, we’ve been talking with Evident Software of late about their the NoSQL support (for example, Cassandra) in their ClearStone tool for application performance monitoring.
Disclosure: Cloudera is a client, as are some other “NoSQL” related folks.
Interesting, we use Toad here for our Oracle work (sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on how expensive it is and how annoying Quest is being in any given year). Might be worth taking a look at from us open source cloud guy types too, seems like,