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Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

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Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#13
post #6
post #2

Hi all. I'm one of the creators of Noms. Happy to answer any questions!

Are you aware of https://github.com/bup/bup ? It's a git file format based backup incremental backup tool. Do you also use rolling checksums (like bup) to prevent re-storing data when only a few bytes have changed? --> What are the major use cases you imagine for noms? I've read the section on Github, but can you give some specific examples that you see as good use cases?

Yes, we credited bup in various places, such as the design overview:

https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.md

We were also heavily influenced by camlistore (which I hacked on for awhile), irmin, ipfs, and others who have done a lot of interesting work in this space.

We do use rolling checksums, but I think we have done some novel work here: https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.md#...

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of https://github.com/bup/bup ? It's a git file format based backup incremental backup tool. Do you also use rolling checksums (like bup) to prevent re-storing data when only a few bytes have changed? --> What are the major use cases you imagine for noms? I've read the section on Github, but can you give some specific examples that you see as good use cases?

Yes, we credited bup in various places, such as the design overview: https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.md We were also heavily influenced by camlistore (which I hacked on for awhile), irmin, ipfs, and others who have done a lot of interesting work in this space. We do use rolling checksums, but I think we have done some novel work here: https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.m…

FYI, the "HTTP protocol" link[1] in the intro page above is broken.

PS: I love the name "Prolly Tree".

[1] " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/datas/databas...

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#18
post #8
post #2

Hi all. I'm one of the creators of Noms. Happy to answer any questions!

Another question to help me better understand the tool: who do you see as your competitors, technically? What do you see as viable alternatives to Noms, but worse? (Or better!) I do see that you were inspired by git, but clearly your use-cases are different.

Git is a competitor. It is fairly common to check data (e.g., csv or json files) into Git today.

However, this falls down pretty rapidly. In order to get reasonable diffs, the data has to be sorted, and line-oriented. Also Git just doesn't scale well to larger repos or individual objects.

Otherwise, we see the competitors as the way that people distribute data today - custom APIs, zip files full of CSV, etc.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#19
post #7

My queston is on scalability. You say "large datasets" on the website. What is large? 1x/10x/100x Terabytes? 1x/10x/100x Petabytes? What kind of access rates? Etc. Very general answers are okay -- I'm trying to wrap my head around whether this is even in the right ballpark for my world. Distinguishing current proof-of-concept vs. design-goal scale is okay too. Thanks!

Honest answer is: we don't know yet -- we're working our way up from the bottom.

But we (cautiously) don't see any reason why the basic design shouldn't scale to very large (e.g. petabyte) datasets, and that is our eventual goal.

That said, we do think there are a lot (even maybe the majority) of use cases in the GB-TB range.

Re: Show HN: Noms – A new decentralized database based on ideas from Git

#20
post #11
post #2

Hi all. I'm one of the creators of Noms. Happy to answer any questions!

does noms understand sql and can it do joins?

The linked page says, as its last line, "many important features are not yet implemented including a query system."
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