Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

The video lists pros/cons for strongly consistent and eventually consistent databases, but only has pros for a "just right consistency" database. What are the cons?

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#5

Post by skrebbel » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

At first glance, this looks amazing. I truly believe CRDTs are the solution to lots of distributed systems problems, and that exposing their characteristics to developers directly, rather than trying to abstract them away in nicer, but leaky, abstractions, is the right way to go.

That said, a major part of why databases are hard is that reliable storage is hard. I see remarkably little about this on Antidote's homepage. I'd wish this was just a frontend to some battle tested storage engine but it appears that this is not the case.

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#6

Post by kevmo314 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

This has that "too good to be true" vibe, and I can't find much information on the authors or the Syncfree Consortium organization that backs the project besides their own website.

Is this at the cost of fast writes or flexible schema? The pitch video doesn't seem to mention any cons, yet seems to avoid mentioning the type of data or mutations supported. I guess I'll go read their publications.

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#7

Post by gjem97 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

This has that "too good to be true" vibe, and I can't find much information on the authors or the Syncfree Consortium organization that backs the project besides their own website. Is this at the cost of fast writes or flexible schema? The pitch video doesn't seem to mention any cons, yet seems to avoid mentioning the type of data or mutations supported. I guess I'll go read their publications.

I think the issue you're looking for is a limited number of supported datatypes. This doesn't appear to be a general-purpose database at the moment: don't expect to drop it in as a replacement for MySQL. Doesn't mean it can't be in the future, but it would have to fall back on other techniques for the datatypes that can't be built with CRDTs.

http://syncfree.github.io/antidote/crdts.html

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#8

Post by gjem97 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

xinsight wrote: post #4

The video lists pros/cons for strongly consistent and eventually consistent databases, but only has pros for a "just right consistency" database. What are the cons?

Limited support for datatypes?

http://syncfree.github.io/antidote/crdts.html

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#9

Post by elvinyung » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

Cieplak wrote: post #3

Looking forward to Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen review.

Jepsen goes into detail about general CRDTs here: https://aphyr.com/posts/285-jepsen-riak

Re: Antidote: CRDT-based distributed database

#10

Post by dustingetz » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:32 PM UTC

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

This has that "too good to be true" vibe, and I can't find much information on the authors or the Syncfree Consortium organization that backs the project besides their own website. Is this at the cost of fast writes or flexible schema? The pitch video doesn't seem to mention any cons, yet seems to avoid mentioning the type of data or mutations supported. I guess I'll go read their publications.

I don't think it encodes a graph that you query (like, say, Neo4J or Postgres with an orm); it seems to give various replicated data structure primitives, like documents, basically a kv store? So for building something like google docs.