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

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#61

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:57 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 ?

If you have been following the case, Google switched from Apache Harmony to OpenJDK saying that Oracle had no basis for claims against future versions because the code is now under license from Oracle. The original ZFS code has always been under the CDDL from Sun and later Oracle. The ZoL code is derived from that, so it should be in the same situation where Oracle cannot make claims against their own licensee.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#62

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:58 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.

It is better to do a clone and do experiments on that before doing anything to the production copy.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#63

Post by bechampion » Wed, May 25, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

Well.. I get the funny side of the comparison , they're two different things..

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#64

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #58

ntlve wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. The legal situation of Google's use of Java APIs was always a tiny bit murky, but it was super-clear-cut compared to the use of ZFS-on-Linux.

Oracle sued over Google reimplementing code that was under the GPL (OpenJDK) under the Apache 2.0 license (Apache Harmony). Google recently switched to the GPL code because of it. In the case of ZoL, the code is derived from the original code and is under the original license. The idea that ZoL is somehow more at risk is pure FUD.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#65

Post by leostrat » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #54

olavgg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe that SoftNAS is able to do that when Windows is using Samba shares hosted on ZFS.

You're right. Here's more info about it: https://www.softnas.com/docs/softnas/v3/html-reference-guide...

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#66

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:06 PM UTC

heisnotanalien wrote: post #17

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.

Except you'll lose all the data since you created the snapshot... You've been able to do this for years on Linux with LVM anyway.

The original poster should have advised people to clone the snapshot. Then you instantly have a copy elsewhere that you can use for experiments without disturbing the original.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#67

Post by zippergz » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

I have a FreeBSD server in my home office that has a big ZFS raidz volume that I use for shared file storage, and it's really, really awesome. The snapshots are especially great because they greatly reduce the fear of screwing something up. I once wanted to run a de-dupe script on several hundred gigabytes of photos, but I was afraid it would go awry, so I snapshotted first, knowing I could roll back in a few keystrokes. (Granted, this wouldn't help much if the script had caused some problem that wasn't immediately apparent. And yes, I have backups of all of that stuff elsewhere, but doing a restore from backup is a lot more work than rolling back a snapshot.)

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#68

Post by ryao » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #57

Wonnk13 wrote: post #37

Are there any beginner resources for learning about file systems? Would be smart / harmful to reformat my whole macbook ssd to ZFS?

I don't think you can use ZFS as a boot volume on Macs (and only on Linux with caveats).

XNU hard codes HFS+ as the rootfs, but people have managed to make Mac OS X boot using a ZFS zvols to store a HFS+ rootfs. Unfortunately, there are no guides for that at this time.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#69

Post by egwynn » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

Three year old article teaches slightly outdated techniques and basic ZFS usage on linux by way of specious comparisons to GIT.

I guess it wasn’t a half bad resource when it came out, but these days there’s got to be better blog posts about this, right?

EDIT: Not that I’m bitter; I love zfs. I mainly wonder how something so old ended up here.

Re: Who Needs Git When You Have ZFS?

#70

Post by espadrine » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:21 PM UTC

> Notably missing is support for merging, which ZFS does not have direct support for as far as I'm aware.

That insight is critical, especially now that we are heading towards Dropbox Infinite, IPFS, Ceph and so many other non-centralized file systems.

Syncing is not a solved problem at all yet. Advances can bring the same revolution as 3-way merging did to SCMs, previously dominated by file-locking mechanisms.