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VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

voltdb.com

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Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#4
This reads like marketing-blogspam to me. These two projects solve totally different problems, and the author acknowledges it, yet he still goes on to highlight benchmarks where VoltDB is 10-20x faster than Cassandra. Of course it's going to be! It's an in-memory store!

So why benchmark against Cassandra? It's got a lot of buzz around it, of course. What a better way to shove your name into the "NoSQL" ring. Blech.

With regard to the numbers themselves, I would refer the author to the CouchDB boys' discussion of benchmarks (under "Good Benchmarks are Non-Trivial"): http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/high-performance

Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#5
I'm at Gluecon, where Mike Stonebraker (CTO of VoltDB) gave a talk about Volt this morning. He's very clear that VoltDB is not a NoSQL product; it's a SQL product, but a next-generation SQL product. He says they've achieved enormous performance gains by keeping ACID compliance by throwing out tons of older tech still present in MySQL and Oracle.

Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#6
in memory vs not, will always have these kinds of results.

most people, most systems, aren't so hot about in memory datastores -- MySQL had MySQL-Cluster/NDB, and for lots of reasons it had trouble ever taking off.

For certain use cases, and definitely for benchmarking purposes, in memory datastores will always crush the competitors, but in the end, most people like reliable data storage.

Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#7
post #6

in memory vs not, will always have these kinds of results. most people, most systems, aren't so hot about in memory datastores -- MySQL had MySQL-Cluster/NDB, and for lots of reasons it had trouble ever taking off. For certain use cases, and definitely for benchmarking purposes, in memory datastores will always crush the competitors, but in the end, most people like reliable data storage.

Most use cases also don't have the entire data set equally active, and it's silly to pay to keep everything in RAM instead of just the hot parts.

Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#8
post #6

in memory vs not, will always have these kinds of results. most people, most systems, aren't so hot about in memory datastores -- MySQL had MySQL-Cluster/NDB, and for lots of reasons it had trouble ever taking off. For certain use cases, and definitely for benchmarking purposes, in memory datastores will always crush the competitors, but in the end, most people like reliable data storage.

In-memory doesn't imply "unreliable". If you need high-availability you'll want to use replication anyway.

Re: VoltDB is out, benchmarks against Cassandra

#10

This reads like marketing-blogspam to me. These two projects solve totally different problems, and the author acknowledges it, yet he still goes on to highlight benchmarks where VoltDB is 10-20x faster than Cassandra. Of course it's going to be! It's an in-memory store! So why benchmark against Cassandra? It's got a lot of buzz around it, of course. What a better way to shove your name into the "NoSQL" ring. Blech. W…

"Cassandra writes to disk. VoltDB is an in-memory database. So I gave both systems plenty of RAM to hold the data set and turned Cassandra's consistency settings pretty low." So in memory in both cases. Cassandra has to write a log, but not synchronously.
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