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MariaDB acquires Clustrix

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Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#21

Post by sethhochberg »

zepearl wrote: post #18
karmakaze wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had high hopes for MyRocks, then I got a chance to use it. The limitations, mainly being 5.6 and no coexistence with InnoDB made me reevaluate TokuDB and it was a better choice for a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits.

I am using as well MariaDB + TokuDB with " a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits " => do you have maybe a short list of the limitations of MyRocks in MariaDB for this area? I tried to use MyRocks (never used it before) in MariaDB some months ago but couldn't find almost any docs and ultimately didn't understand which parameters were supposed to be set how un…

IMO this is one of the biggest issues with the alternative storage engines for MySQL-family databases... we've also experimented with TokuDB for log-like data but found that, ultimately, the shortage of detailed documentation and operational issues like needing to develop homegrown tooling for things like backups overpowered the performance benefits.

InnoDB isn't perfect, but it _is_ exhaustively documented and pretty well-understood, with a great set of related tools from Percona, etc, for simplifying operations. That goes a long way.

Recently we've switched back to using InnoDB for ingestion on one of our write-heavy tables and aggressively archiving the data out of it and into Clickhouse (InnoDB deals with the high volume of concurrent inserts, data is loaded into Clickhouse in large batches for querying). By comparison to Toku or RocksDB, Clickhouse is refreshingly well-documented and its easy for us to make consistent backups with ZFS snapshots.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#22

Post by misterbowfinger »

Couldn't really parse out the website for what Clustrix actually is. Is it basically a leader node that distributes writes to key-value stores, and then the reads figure out where the data is by a partitioning scheme, with the benefit of MySQL protocol? Similar to CockroachDB?

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#23

Post by erulabs »

Rafuino wrote: post #11

What does Clustrix offer that MariaDB Cluster within its MariaDB TX offering not?

I believe the main (and only?) purpose of Clustrix is sharding, which MariaDB Cluster doesn't provide - with the provision I suppose that multi-master is strictly -not- the same as sharding.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#24

Post by mr_pickles »

Alright, for your education startup employees, let's run through some numbers I have as a stockholder in Clustrix.

In 2010, they raised $12M in their Series B at ~$100M post-money valuation. Things were looking alright.

In 2013, they raised $16.5M in their Series C, and then shortly thereafter $10M in an unusual series D. That funding round reverse-split the outstanding stock 26-to-1 and converted all existing shares, preferred or otherwise, to common stock. What was left was $10M in new preferred stock, and $20M in existing common stock! New post-money valuation: $30M. This down round ended up being a 30x dilution for existing shareholders. If you had a tenth of a percent of $100M before, now you had a hundredth of a percent of $30M. Yowza!

After that bath, the board amended the charter so they stopped mailing out these notices. I don't know what's happened since, but I'll find out soon enough.

I feel bad that the company wasn't successful. It really was a great team and an impressive technical feat.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#25

Post by mr_pickles »

misterbowfinger wrote: post #22

Couldn't really parse out the website for what Clustrix actually is. Is it basically a leader node that distributes writes to key-value stores, and then the reads figure out where the data is by a partitioning scheme, with the benefit of MySQL protocol? Similar to CockroachDB?

It was a fault-tolerant, fully distributed relational database which was compatible with MySQL's variant of SQL. There were no key-value stores involved.

Tables (and indexes) were automatically partitioned and replicated as needed, completely under the covers.

Queries (reads and writes) were distributed to the nodes where the data resided, in parallel.

Scaling the system was as simple as adding new nodes. Data was automatically rebalanced to take advantage of the new capacity.

Failure recovery was automatic too. If a disk or node failed, the data involved would be reconstructed from replicas and moved elsewhere with no interruption in service and no failed transactions.

It was a pretty impressive system, which predated Google Spanner. But, in the early days, you had to run their custom hardware to get it. There was no cloud version.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#26

Post by misterbowfinger »

mr_pickles wrote: post #25
misterbowfinger wrote: post #22

Couldn't really parse out the website for what Clustrix actually is. Is it basically a leader node that distributes writes to key-value stores, and then the reads figure out where the data is by a partitioning scheme, with the benefit of MySQL protocol? Similar to CockroachDB?

It was a fault-tolerant, fully distributed relational database which was compatible with MySQL's variant of SQL. There were no key-value stores involved. Tables (and indexes) were automatically partitioned and replicated as needed, completely under the covers. Queries (reads and writes) were distributed to the nodes where the data resided, in parallel. Scaling the system was as simple as adding new nodes. Data was au…

Thanks! Is there a diagram that shows how it works? I'm still having trouble visualizing it.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#27

Post by greglindahl »

mr_pickles wrote: post #24

Alright, for your education startup employees, let's run through some numbers I have as a stockholder in Clustrix. In 2010, they raised $12M in their Series B at ~$100M post-money valuation. Things were looking alright. In 2013, they raised $16.5M in their Series C, and then shortly thereafter $10M in an unusual series D. That funding round reverse-split the outstanding stock 26-to-1 and converted all existing shares…

VCs do deals all of the time, and us startup people do only a few, so I'm hardly an expert... but this down round sounds unusually friendly to common stockholders.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#28

Post by nehcsivart »

misterbowfinger wrote: post #26
mr_pickles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a fault-tolerant, fully distributed relational database which was compatible with MySQL's variant of SQL. There were no key-value stores involved. Tables (and indexes) were automatically partitioned and replicated as needed, completely under the covers. Queries (reads and writes) were distributed to the nodes where the data resided, in parallel. Scaling the system was as simple as adding new nodes. Data was au…

Thanks! Is there a diagram that shows how it works? I'm still having trouble visualizing it.

Not a diagram, but here is an informational video by Clustrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUq1fYZlNPs

The video is from almost 5 years ago, but the high level idea discussed is still true today.

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#29

Post by mdcallag »

karmakaze wrote: post #17
Shelnutt2 wrote: post #2

First they picked up infinidb a while back and have been working to mainline "mariadb columnstore". Now the acquisition of Clustrix and discussion of mainlining that also. It looks like MySQLs separation of the storage engines is paying off in their ability to keep one interface but allowing significantly different backends to meet the different workload requirements. There has been a lot of work expanding the storag…

I had high hopes for MyRocks, then I got a chance to use it. The limitations, mainly being 5.6 and no coexistence with InnoDB made me reevaluate TokuDB and it was a better choice for a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits.

MyRocks isn't 5.6 only. It is in Percona 5.7 and MariaDB 10.3

I agree that tuning is too complex and we should do much better there. This explains where to ask for advice - http://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2018/05/where-to-ask-question...

Re: MariaDB acquires Clustrix

#30

Post by mdcallag »

zepearl wrote: post #18
karmakaze wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had high hopes for MyRocks, then I got a chance to use it. The limitations, mainly being 5.6 and no coexistence with InnoDB made me reevaluate TokuDB and it was a better choice for a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits.

I am using as well MariaDB + TokuDB with " a write heavy, low update, workload especially with interval flushing (non-fsync durable) commits " => do you have maybe a short list of the limitations of MyRocks in MariaDB for this area? I tried to use MyRocks (never used it before) in MariaDB some months ago but couldn't find almost any docs and ultimately didn't understand which parameters were supposed to be set how un…

There are many options but most don't have to be set. We need to improve the tuning experience. See http://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2018/09/5-things-to-set-when-...
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