Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#41

Post by olavgg » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #33

xenophonf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad Unix/Linux doesn't offer something like Windows' VSS API, where the operating system can inform registered applications or services of an impending backup operation.

It's too bad that VSS is unreliable. If I had a nickel for everytime one of my backups failed due to a VSS writer issue, I'd own Symantec AND EMC. This has been across Win2k/2003/2008. We've been using 2012 for the last year (yeah, old stodgy corporations move slowly), and I haven't seen the same number of errors, but we're also not doing as many client based backups either.

Have you guys thought about giving Windows ZFS volumes over iSCSI and then take ZFS snapshots? For example with SQL Server, it should be possible to talk to the SQL Writer Service and create a consistent database snapshot of a live SQL Server database with ZFS.

When this snapshot is taken you can send & recv the diff to a remote backup server.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#42

Post by ntlve » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

xenophonf wrote: post #27

Finnucane wrote: post #8

"Oracle's (previously Sun's) next-generation file system" That's why you need to stick with Git.

What does Oracle have to do with anything? This is FUD.

It is certainly not FUD, see https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google

The point is, Oracle have decided to sue once over usage of something they bought and may do so again in the future.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#43

Post by badmadrad » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

Weird title as Git and ZFS are used for completely different reasons but I love ZFS as well and the article highlighted some of the finer details which was great.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#44

Post by savedmybutt » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:29 PM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #7

ZFS is excellent for database development! Create a snapshot before you try something that mess up your data and instantly restore it! If your development database is a few gigabytes, this will save you a lot of time.

Absolutely. It's also good for production. This feature saved my butt once when I upgraded a postgresql 8.3 server to 8.4 on a Sun 4500 not realizing that the new server was compiled with a different timestamp format then the old one was (8 byte integers vs double precision floats). Thanks to ZFS I was able to trivially roll back the update.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#45

Post by rlpb » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

Branches and tags are just snapshots and clones? This actually looks more like Subversion than git, together with the challenges with managing merges that this model brings.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#46

Post by greedo » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #41

greedo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad that VSS is unreliable. If I had a nickel for everytime one of my backups failed due to a VSS writer issue, I'd own Symantec AND EMC. This has been across Win2k/2003/2008. We've been using 2012 for the last year (yeah, old stodgy corporations move slowly), and I haven't seen the same number of errors, but we're also not doing as many client based backups either.

Have you guys thought about giving Windows ZFS volumes over iSCSI and then take ZFS snapshots? For example with SQL Server, it should be possible to talk to the SQL Writer Service and create a consistent database snapshot of a live SQL Server database with ZFS. When this snapshot is taken you can send & recv the diff to a remote backup server.

Our experience with iSCSI hasn't been very good; its use is limited to some dev ESX systems. Our DBAs prefer to perform cold backups that we backup with traditional tools (Avamar).

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#47

Post by delonia » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

Ubuntu 16.04 comes with ZFS preinstalled and ready to use.

Well, you need to install the user package 'zfsutils-linux' and you are ready to go.

The kernel modules for ZFS are already in the default kernel and are loaded automatically when you create a volume.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#48

Post by delonia » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

chmike wrote: post #35

How production ready is ZFS on Ubuntu (Debian?) ? Is there any risk of Oracle fighting back open source zfs as for Java with Google and Android ?

ZFS is under the CDDL while Java is not under the CDDL.

CDDL is an open-source licence just as the GPL.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#49

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #10

olavgg wrote: post #7

ZFS is excellent for database development! Create a snapshot before you try something that mess up your data and instantly restore it! If your development database is a few gigabytes, this will save you a lot of time.

Sounds great. Can you also duplicate versions of a database to coworkers on the same machine without much cost?

Do a snapshot and clone. Then you will have an exact copy of the data mounted elsewhere that you can modify independently.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#50

Post by chungy » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

Freaky wrote: post #28

buserror wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and the rather obvious 'sudo' in front of all the commands. I mean, it's a cool tool; I use it on my NAS (particularly like the ECC mode instead of dumb RAID), but the git-equivalence aspect looks a little bit like a flamebait ;-)

zfs allow zef mount,create,destroy,snapshot,rollback,diff,clone,send,receive mypool/projects Now he doesn't need sudo in front of most of them.

Unfortunately, it remains a feature only on Solaris/illumos and FreeBSD. The Linux and Mac ports still lack support for delegation.