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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

#101

Post by haberman »

Is schemaless a win over an object schema like a JSON schema (or a Protocol Buffer .proto file)?

Schemaless is clearly a convenience win over SQL because SQL's way of modeling nested/repeated data doesn't map as easily onto programming languages. But for all the people who are using JSON-based databases these days, I'm curious how many of them couldn't easily write a JSON schema or a .proto file that describes their de facto schema.

I ask because a lot of things become easier to reason about (and optimize) if you know that a field won't be a string in one record and a number in another. And writing a .proto file (or equivalent JSON schema) would give you an authoritative place to document what all the fields actually mean.

I don't have any actual experience with JSON-based databases, so I was interested to hear the opinions of people who do.

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

#102

Post by embwbam »

haberman wrote: post #101

Is schemaless a win over an object schema like a JSON schema (or a Protocol Buffer .proto file)? Schemaless is clearly a convenience win over SQL because SQL's way of modeling nested/repeated data doesn't map as easily onto programming languages. But for all the people who are using JSON-based databases these days, I'm curious how many of them couldn't easily write a JSON schema or a .proto file that describes their…

this. I don't like SQL columns. They make life hard. But I'm spending time learning TypeScript specifically so I can add some types/schemas to my JavaScript.

That doesn't mean I want to deal with the implementation detail of columns, but I definitely wouldn't mind some type safety.

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

#103

Post by coffeemug »

haberman wrote: post #101

Is schemaless a win over an object schema like a JSON schema (or a Protocol Buffer .proto file)? Schemaless is clearly a convenience win over SQL because SQL's way of modeling nested/repeated data doesn't map as easily onto programming languages. But for all the people who are using JSON-based databases these days, I'm curious how many of them couldn't easily write a JSON schema or a .proto file that describes their…

There is of course no fundamental reason why JSON-based db's has to be schemaless. This is one interesting direction that might be worth exploring.

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

#104

Post by coffeemug »

shawn-butler wrote: post #62
coffeemug wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance analysis of complex systems is really tricky, and good benchmarks are even trickier. We'll be working through posting numbers, docs, tips, etc. over the next few months. Documenting this well is very hard work, so it'll take a little bit of time. In the meantime, you can always chat with us and we'll help you work through any issues you might run into.

Can I provide an intelligent sharding algorithm in place of a naive partition by primary key? I always get into trouble encoding things into primary keys eventually.

Not at the moment, unfortunately.

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

#105

Post by daslee1969 »

gruseom wrote: post #48
tjic wrote: post #39

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.

You could not have gotten these guys more wrong. They are serious technologists who have been working day and night for years to build something that they deeply believe in. Every hacker's heart should be warmed by the fact that they kept at it. When you have a vision of something great that ought to exist and set about bringing it into the world, you are in an isolated position: other people don't yet see what you s…

cannot agree more. saw firsthand how hard this team kept at it!

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

#106

Post by daslee1969 »

gruseom wrote: post #48
tjic wrote: post #39

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.

You could not have gotten these guys more wrong. They are serious technologists who have been working day and night for years to build something that they deeply believe in. Every hacker's heart should be warmed by the fact that they kept at it. When you have a vision of something great that ought to exist and set about bringing it into the world, you are in an isolated position: other people don't yet see what you s…

cannot agree more. saw firsthand how hard this team kept at it!

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

#107

Post by m0th87 »

coffeemug wrote: post #103
haberman wrote: post #101

Is schemaless a win over an object schema like a JSON schema (or a Protocol Buffer .proto file)? Schemaless is clearly a convenience win over SQL because SQL's way of modeling nested/repeated data doesn't map as easily onto programming languages. But for all the people who are using JSON-based databases these days, I'm curious how many of them couldn't easily write a JSON schema or a .proto file that describes their…

There is of course no fundamental reason why JSON-based db's has to be schemaless. This is one interesting direction that might be worth exploring.

I would love a system that is schema-less by design, but has guards that can be enforced at insert/update. That way, the underlying data structures don't have to be locked up from complex migrations (as needed w/ ALTER TABLE), but you still get type safety. A migration instead would simply involve a change in guards and an asynchronous update of existing entries. Plus you'd get all the wins of something resembling optional types: you only enforce guards if you want.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

jdoliner wrote: post #76
xutopia wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the elevator pitch? Maybe we can help you with those advantages if you can tell us right now.

The elevator pitch is: "Mongo's ease of use without the gotchas." We have a nice simple to use query language and quick setup process. But things like analytic queries like map reduce don't lock up the entire database. Our product aims to not be a ticking time bomb of technical debt.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by cpeterso »

kemiller wrote: post #90
crazygringo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have nothing to do with RethinkDB, but what are you talking about? Just represent them as strings. (What databases support colors as native types, anyways?) If you format dates YYYY-MM-DD, then you can do string comparisons for ranges. And JSON has the huge advantage of supporting hierarchical data -- arrays with objects inside, etc. It seems a like a huge step forward.

But there's no standard way of representing the dates as strings, or indicating that this field here is a date and not a string that happens to look like one, so nothing can rely on what you do. You can represent literally anything with a string, but you lose type information when you do.

ISO 8601 is a standard way of representing dates as strings, e.g. "2012-11-09T08:08Z".
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