Imagine a globally replicated and version controlled object store. You could use this for data, assets, source code, anything you like. Would be incredibly useful for both the development side of things, as well as production.
Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#22Imagine a globally replicated and version controlled object store. You could use this for data, assets, source code, anything you like. Would be incredibly useful for both the development side of things, as well as production.
Timdb ?
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#23Sooo, being able to distribute data globally is good for performance? Who knew? The thing about distributed systems, including distributed databases is that they need to navigate around the the CAP theorem(Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance, pick two, essentially,) and every solution is ultimately a trade off. This article would be a lot more interesting if it showed how CockroachDB made a better trade off than the other solutions listed.
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#24CDN: no trade offs. Faster everywhere. More reliable overall Cockroach DB: trade some performance for geographic redundancy. The trade off may work in your favor - e.g. read heavy workloads (or not). I plugged in CDB I place of Postgres for some testing this week, was surprised it worked so well.
At my previous company we built our own CDN because we were streaming video to a long tail of global users for a limited library. The problem with off-the-shelf CDNs was they couldn't keep our content cached for the long tail, but for the same price we could replicate our limited library to bare metal. Traditional caching could then go on top of that.
This was a huge win for QoS on cache misses, which were a significant portion of our traffic. There are tons of tradeoffs to make this happen which is why we couldn't find an off-the-shelf solution to deliver the same results.
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#25CDN: no trade offs. Faster everywhere. More reliable overall Cockroach DB: trade some performance for geographic redundancy. The trade off may work in your favor - e.g. read heavy workloads (or not). I plugged in CDB I place of Postgres for some testing this week, was surprised it worked so well.
no trade offs This is almost never the case, and CDNs are no exception. A CDN like Cloudflare that reuses your domain(s) means that they become just a useless point that your dynamic requests have to travel to and from the main server. A CDN that uses its own domains requires extra DNS queries, extra TCP & SSL connection setup, etc, plus it only starts loading when the browser has started processing the HTML.
Excellent points. I definitely oversimplified.
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#26> When partitions heal, you might have to make ugly decisions: which version of your customer’s data to you choose to discard? If two partitions received updates, it’s a lose-lose situation.
When partitions heal you simply merge all versions through conflict-free replicated data types. No ugly decisions, no sacrificing neither latency nor consistency. We call it strong eventual consistency [1] nowadays. And it's exactly like CDNs, except more reliable.
I'm wondering, since CockroachDB keeps lying about and attacking eventual consistency in these PR posts, the whole "consistency is worth sacrificing latency" mantra might not work in practice after all. People just don't buy it, they want low latency, they want something like CDNs, something fast and reliable, something that just works. Something that CockroachDB can never deliver.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency#Strong_ev...
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#27CDN: no trade offs. Faster everywhere. More reliable overall Cockroach DB: trade some performance for geographic redundancy. The trade off may work in your favor - e.g. read heavy workloads (or not). I plugged in CDB I place of Postgres for some testing this week, was surprised it worked so well.
Unless you build your own DNS routed CDN, it actually reduces reliability. And to make it faster everywhere you trade immediate consistency for eventual consistency.
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#28I'm curious, what sort of read latency is achievable with CockroachDB? Does it support some notion of tunable read consistency in order to achieve lower read latency at the expense of consistency?
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#29Sooo, being able to distribute data globally is good for performance? Who knew? The thing about distributed systems, including distributed databases is that they need to navigate around the the CAP theorem(Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance, pick two, essentially,) and every solution is ultimately a trade off. This article would be a lot more interesting if it showed how CockroachDB made a better trade of…
The article they link at the end explains this: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/transactions.html
Re: Distributed Databases Should Work More Like CDNs
#30> When partitions heal, you might have to make ugly decisions: which version of your customer’s data to you choose to discard? If two partitions received updates, it’s a lose-lose situation. When partitions heal you simply merge all versions through conflict-free replicated data types. No ugly decisions, no sacrificing neither latency nor consistency. We call it strong eventual consistency [1] nowadays. And it's exac…
My application is just plain old CRUD.
What if two users want to change e.g. the telephone number of an existing record during a network partition.
There just is no obvious way to merge a telephone number. One of them is correct, the other is incorrect.
Can CRDTs solve my simple problem?