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RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#31

Post by coffeemug »

codewright wrote: post #28

I'm hoping this'll be a viable replacement for MongoDB. (Sparse/Schema-free is incredibly useful for me, as is JSON-centric modeling) jedberg already asked for a compare/contrast, but let me provide some specifics I care about that you might be able to answer. 1. Is it fair to say that thanks to MVCC, running an aggregation or map-reduce job isn't going to lock the whole damn thing up like it does on MongoDB? 2. You'…

1. Yes -- that was the main motivation for MVCC. We wanted to allow people to use rethinkdb for analytics and map/reduce on top of the realtime system without dealing with having to replicate data into something else.

2. Short answer: we favor consistency (via master/slave under the hood). It allows for much easier API, much fewer issues in production, etc. The user experience is just better. If you're ok with out of date results, you can do that too without paying the price of consistency guarantees. The downsite of our design is that you might lose write availability in case of netsplits (if the client is on the wrong side of the split). Longer answer: checkout the FAQ at http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/advanced-faq/

3. Read latency should be equivalent to other comparable master/slave systems. We don't do quorums, so latency will be much better than quorum/dynamo-based designs.

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#32

Post by jdoliner »

mej10 wrote: post #21
coffeemug wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is Slava, founder of rethinkdb. There are some obvious high level differences: * A far more advanced query language -- distributed joins, subqueries, etc. -- almost anything you can do in SQL you can do in RethinkDB * MVCC -- which means you can run analytics on your realtime system without locking up * All queries are fully parallelized -- the compiler takes the query, breaks it up, distributes it, runs it…

What do you see as the potential areas where RethinkDB will shine? Also, I am excited to try this out. I always enjoyed your writings and I am sure you + team have made something awesome.

Joe Doliner - Engineer at RethinkDB here. RethinkDB is designed for small teams with big data challenges. When you're just starting up a new project ideally you want to just boot your database up and start throwing data at it without worrying about schema. However with other products on the market, most notably Mongo, there are a lot of features that stop working when you get to a large scale. We've been very careful in developing RethinkDB to make sure that small teams who use our product aren't going to need to rewrite code once their dataset starts growing. As coffeemug mentions above we support fully parallelized queries. This means that when your dataset grows you can add more servers to speed up analytic queries. We feel this a valuable feature for small teams.

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#33

Post by continuations »

* In the previous incarnation of rethinkdb the focus was on maximizing performance on SSDs. Is this still the case - does rethinkDB perform better than other databases on SSDs? Do you have any benchmark numbers?

* How does rethinkdb compare to MySQL Cluster? Both are distributed, replicated databases with a sql-like query language.

* Any plan to offer a java client?

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#34

Post by eventdroid »

coffeemug wrote: post #25
jedberg wrote: post #17

Suggestion: It would be great to have a page on your website that explains why RethinkDB is better than the other prevailing options. Right now I don't know why I'd want to invest time setting up yet another database.

Thanks -- will do in the next few days.

yeh, that would be interesting to know.

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#36

Post by whyleyc »

coffeemug wrote: post #18
l0stman wrote: post #12

I was just wondering if you've planned on open-sourcing the code since the very beginning or if the idea came much later. Anyway congrats on launching.

We wanted to open-source all along, but there were concerns raised by investors about IP, etc. It took us a bit of time to work through all the issues people raised, which is why it took so long.

How do you plan on monetizing the business ? Are you looking at some kind of consultancy play, ala Redhat / MySQL (pre-Oracle) ?

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#37

Post by coffeemug »

continuations wrote: post #33

* In the previous incarnation of rethinkdb the focus was on maximizing performance on SSDs. Is this still the case - does rethinkDB perform better than other databases on SSDs? Do you have any benchmark numbers? * How does rethinkdb compare to MySQL Cluster? Both are distributed, replicated databases with a sql-like query language. * Any plan to offer a java client?

* The SSD-optimized storage engine is running under the clustering engine. I'm wary of saying 'better' or 'worse' in case of benchmarks, because they're really tricky to do right. We'll be publishing well-researched benchmarks as soon as we can, but it will take time.

* RethinkDB has flexible schemas and a query language that integrates straight into the host programming language and doesn't require string interpolation. As far as clustering goes, RethinkDB is a) really really really easy to use, and b) does a lot of query parallelization and distribution that MySQL cluster doesn't do. The product feels totally different, I think in a good way. The downside, of course, is that rethink is new and it will take some time to work out all the kinks.

* I can't commit to a timeline yet, but yes, absolutely.

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#38

Post by jdoliner »

fooyc wrote: post #30
coffeemug wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is Slava, founder of rethinkdb. There are some obvious high level differences: * A far more advanced query language -- distributed joins, subqueries, etc. -- almost anything you can do in SQL you can do in RethinkDB * MVCC -- which means you can run analytics on your realtime system without locking up * All queries are fully parallelized -- the compiler takes the query, breaks it up, distributes it, runs it…

> All queries are fully parallelized Does it means that every query touches all servers ? Or does it sends queries to only a subset of servers when possible ? (e.g. range queries on PK)

Joe Doliner - RethinkDB engineer here. > Does it means that every query touches all servers ? No.

> Or does it sends queries to only a subset of servers when possible ? (e.g. range queries on PK)

The query planner distributes the query between the nodes that actually contain the relevant data. Here are a few examples:

In your example, a range get on the primary key, the query would touch one copy of each shard of the table. *

A more interesting example is a map reduce query. That query will also only touch one copy of each shard of the table but the mapping and reduction phases will also happen on those shards which makes the whole process a lot faster.

Re: RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

#39

Post by tjic »

What the heck does "built with love" even mean?

Is this just a hipster marketing term to tell us that it's small and cute and made by people who play ukuleles and ride unicycles in their spare time, and not by evil corporate people who commute to work and have mortgages?

I find a lot of advertising eyeroll inducing, and the current trend of more-hipster-than-thou posturing is right at the top.

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