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Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#101

Post by Tanjreeve »

fforflo wrote: post #36
antirez wrote: post #14

Wow, the reasons why Redis commands API suck in Andy's video (linked in the post) are the weakest ever. It is possible to make a case against the Redis API (I would not agree of course but... it's totally legitimate), but you gotta have stronger arguments than those, particularly if you are a teacher of some kind. Especially: you need to be somewhat fluent in Redis and how developers use Redis in order to understand…

I've been working on something Redis-y over the holidays, and it has reinforced my view that it's the epitome of a 20%- 80% tool. I've always used the 20%, but anything beyond that sounds useless unless you've encountered the requirement in a production environment. The challenges Redis has been solving for years, never really touched the research/academic community (even the 20%). Even in the various taxonomies of D…

Developers know it's limits. Or you have developers with vague "scaling issues" or "buggy caching" who don't understand why they have them or suddenly start suffering from them at inconvenient moments.

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#102

Post by moab »

apavlo wrote: post #76
dig1 wrote: post #32

> There was no major effort to fork off MongoDB, Neo4j, Kafka, or CockroachDB when they announced their license changes. AFAIK people didn't take MongoDB seriously from the start, especially with the "web scale database" joke circulating. The Neo4j Community version has been under GPLv3 for quite some time, while the Enterprise version has always been somewhat closed, regardless of whether the source code was availab…

> Wrt Andy, here are [1] somehow interesting views from (presumably) previous employees. I am only seeing this now and I take the complaints about being "slightly racist and offensive" very seriously. I am checking with investors, former HR people, and co-founders. I was not made aware of any issues. If anything, I was overly cautious at the company. I was openly transparent with our employees about every direction t…

FWIW, as someone who had multiple friends who worked closely with Andy over 5+ years and at all stages of their career (both BS / PhD) those comments reek of someone with an axe to grind. All of the many anecdotes I have about Andy paint a picture of a great advisor and mentor. I suppose I should say "shenanigans aside", but if you can't separate his jokes from his academic side you need to develop a sense of humor.

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#103

Post by Tanjreeve »

ak_111 wrote: post #50

Wow his database startup that raised 12M died this year after only three years. If anything this shows how insanely difficult it must be to succeed as a database startup (when was the most recent startup success in this space?), as the founding team is stellar. On the other hand I am surprised it died this quick and interested to know if they did a proper postmortem. Not only did they raise way more than is needed to…

No idea about internal workings but as a "DB optimisation" startup you're competing with

- most people don't need it

- People who do need it having DBAs/Operations people

- or consultancies

- Database vendors that have automatic optimisation as a feature

Ok "AI" in the name but I think for something as specific as DB optimisation AI jazz hands probably don't work as well. Writing it out it almost seems harder than being an actual DB vendor.

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#104

Post by olavgg »

Tostino wrote: post #94
teej wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people choosing SQL Server independently of the Microsoft ecosystem? My understating is that you typically use it because you’re forced to choose a MS product.

Agreed with the other person. It's a great database. I wouldn't choose it for a startup over Postgres, but it is extremely capable.

I would use it if it supported backup/restore over unix pipes / ssh.

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#105

Post by pdhborges »

Spivak wrote: post #85
brightball wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I always use Redis for very specialized purposes. Like offloading a shared data structure between threads / processes / machines so that I don’t have to deal with thread safety issues.

I understand machines but threads ?! Why introduce IPC overhead on the fastest/easiest way to share data? This is beyond a solved problem and your language probably has multiple ready-made battle tested solutions. In Python you don't even need a lib, dict is thread safe even in nogil.

  In Python you don't even need a lib, dict is thread safe even in nogil.
Is it? https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html#218-threadi...

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#108

Post by Tanjreeve »

wslh wrote: post #38

Great heads up. I wonder about graph databases. He mentioned https://umbra-db.com/ > and https://cedardb.com/ > both include the graph use case and I wonder how they compare to https://neo4j.com/ >.

Umbra and cedar are both still relational databases. Afaik the jury is now out on if graph databases are better than modern relational databases for most graph queries especially ones with good query planners/compilers. The only time graph DBs seem to be consistently better is for very specialist many degrees traversals for small amounts of data.

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#109

Post by C-programmer »

spprashant wrote: post #51
mebcitto wrote: post #29

A couple of spicy things: > OtterTune. Dana, Bohan, and I worked on this research project and startup for almost a decade. And now it is dead. I am disappointed at how a particular company treated us at the end, so they are forever banned from recruiting CMU-DB students. They know who they are and what they did. Ouch. > Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to ByteBase for their article Database Tools in 2024: A Year in…

Anyone know what company he may be talking about?

Inspect element on https://web.archive.org/web/20240827031455/https://ottertune...

For more context:

> I'm to sad to announce that @OtterTuneAI is officially dead. Our service is shutdown and we let everyone go today (1mo notice). I can't got into details of what happened but we got screwed over by a PE Postgres company on an acquisition offer. https://x.com/andy_pavlo/status/1801687420330770841

Re: Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

#110

Post by rplnt »

stackskipton wrote: post #78
codeulike wrote: post #17

Weird how SQL Server and its Azure variants gets no mention. It dominates in certain sectors. DBEngines ranks it third most popular overall https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

SRE who deals with some .Net stuff that uses MSSQL but is converting to MySQL. so I feel somewhat qualified to talk about MSSQL. TL;DR: Nothing interesting going on. There is nothing to talk about here. It's boring database engine that powers boring business applications. It's pretty efficient and can scale vertically pretty well. With state of modern hardware, that vertical limit is high enough most people won't enc…

> It's boring database engine that powers boring business applications.

FWIW, it also powered the most popular (in terms of player base) MMORPG before WoW took over.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find it in aviation, railways, powerplants, grid control, etc...

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