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TokuDB open sourced

tokutek.com

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fractal Tree indexes are very different from Dancing Trees. See http://tokutek.com/what-is-a-fractal-tree for an overview, and I'd be happy to answer questions if you have them.

Hmmm, after reading the simple explanation PDF of Fractal Trees, they sound more like Dancing Trees than I'd assumed, but I am a poorly informed outsider. The key feature, from a performance perspective, is that writes are minimized by making each write do more, though both also help with SSD wear as a side effect. So, from the outside, it looks like both accomplish many of the same goals, and they do it by fundament…

Dancing Trees are algorithmically the same as B+ trees, if I understand the wikipedia article correctly. With just a uniformly random workload with a large enough working set, one would behave pretty much exactly the same as a B+ tree.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#42

Is there any testimonial using TokuDB?

Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/

Edit, oops followed parents link to this: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/:

"Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while database is running."

- Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to take a backup of a running database?

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors. I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every corporation on their website actually.

"A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors." Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors…

In practice, independent invention happens all the time, and we end up with absurd patent lawsuits as a result.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#44

Does this mean that it's now safe for folks to write their own versions of the data structures that tokutek has patents on? They hold patents on some of the more natural choices In cache oblivious b trees (admittedly they also invented those retrospectively natural choices).

Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors. I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every corporation on their website actually.

Can someone in the know elaborate on the current state of US patent law here? And what exactly TokuDB / the universities hold a patent on?

Curious outsider here, and understand that all IANAL caveats apply.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors." Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors…

In practice, independent invention happens all the time, and we end up with absurd patent lawsuits as a result.

AFAIK none of these ludicrous patents are about data structures, algorithms or math formulas.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#46
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/

Edit, oops followed parents link to this: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/ : "Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while database is running." - Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to take a backup of a running database?

Someone using the open source version can take backups just as they would with our versions prior to 7.0:

- snapshots (LVM, EBS, etc...)

- cold backups

- mysqldump (with MVCC, this is technically hot)

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors." Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors…

In practice, independent invention happens all the time, and we end up with absurd patent lawsuits as a result.

You've made 2 wrong assumptions:

1) data structures are patentable. Where is your proof that pure data structure not tied to hardware or a specific problem are?

2) independent invention happens all the time. Actually, when you look closely, it happens very rarely relative to the overall number of inventions. Where is your proof that it does happen enough to merits change?

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors. I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every corporation on their website actually.

"A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors." Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors…

The onus placed on them is too great when it appears as a dilemma between a yearly $X0,000 extortion or one-time $X,000,000 lawsuit.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#49

I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions. But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra a…

My impression was that TokuDB is a single-server database, as a backend for MySQL. In that case it wouldn't be a direct competitor to HBase and Cassandra, both of which you normally wouldn't even consider unless you expect to have a cluster of machines.

You'd arguably be taking a risk by choosing a centralized database for write-heavy applications, which are the hardest to scale, but I could see it as a good fit for the applications where people currently use sharded MySQL.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#50
post #49

I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions. But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra a…

My impression was that TokuDB is a single-server database, as a backend for MySQL. In that case it wouldn't be a direct competitor to HBase and Cassandra, both of which you normally wouldn't even consider unless you expect to have a cluster of machines. You'd arguably be taking a risk by choosing a centralized database for write-heavy applications, which are the hardest to scale, but I could see it as a good fit for…

Cassandra and HBase Shard, they just shard differently since the shard is baked into the system while in MySQL its not. If you get right down do it, When you Shard on Toku, it will simply be more efficient at a storage level.
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