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TokuDB open sourced

tokutek.com

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#22
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).

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#23
post #8
post #4

Was quite looking forward to reading this, but when I clicked the link, I was faced with: http://imgur.com/wwEogpx I think there's a certain irony seeing as this is a database related announcement!

You took a screenshot of plain text. Did "Error establishing database connection" not suffice?

Well ... I think it's actually pretty good bug reporting habit. Was it text/plain or unstyled text/html? Was the body an error message but a styled header and footer present? You might want to copy and paste the text as well, to aid future copy and paste efforts, but it's surprisingly frequently useful to have a screenshot.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#24
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 and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-optimized databases.

If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#25

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).

I'm unfamiliar with this particular implementation, but it sounds (from your one sentence description) kinda like Dancing Trees, created by Hans Reiser, for ReiserFS. Would this be prior art, or would this be different approaches to similar problems?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_tree

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#26

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).

I'm unfamiliar with this particular implementation, but it sounds (from your one sentence description) kinda like Dancing Trees, created by Hans Reiser, for ReiserFS. Would this be prior art, or would this be different approaches to similar problems? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_tree

Yes and no. I think they're doing a variant of cache oblivious buffered B epsilon trees. Ill have to go code spelunking (now that the source is available. Boy am I glad it's gplv2 and not some (a)gplv3 variant).

Thanks for the interesting reference!

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unfamiliar with this particular implementation, but it sounds (from your one sentence description) kinda like Dancing Trees, created by Hans Reiser, for ReiserFS. Would this be prior art, or would this be different approaches to similar problems? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_tree

Yes and no. I think they're doing a variant of cache oblivious buffered B epsilon trees. Ill have to go code spelunking (now that the source is available. Boy am I glad it's gplv2 and not some (a)gplv3 variant). Thanks for the interesting reference!

For the patent side of things, it being GPLv2 is sort of unfortunate compared to GPLv3, because v3 contains a patent grant, whereas v2 doesn't. It's possible some kind of implicit patent grant could be read into it by a court, e.g. that by open-sourcing some software, a company is making an open offer to use/modify the software, and then if they turned around and sued you for doing so, some equitable doctrine like estoppel would stand in the way. But an explicit patent grant is a lot clearer.

For companies wary of v3 for other reasons, I wonder if there's an easy/semi-standardized way to tack on a patent grant? I'd feel much safer using open-source software licensed under some kind of "MIT + patent grant" or "GPLv2 + patent grant" license than the vanilla versions.

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. I think they're doing a variant of cache oblivious buffered B epsilon trees. Ill have to go code spelunking (now that the source is available. Boy am I glad it's gplv2 and not some (a)gplv3 variant). Thanks for the interesting reference!

For the patent side of things, it being GPLv2 is sort of unfortunate compared to GPLv3, because v3 contains a patent grant, whereas v2 doesn't. It's possible some kind of implicit patent grant could be read into it by a court, e.g. that by open-sourcing some software, a company is making an open offer to use/modify the software, and then if they turned around and sued you for doing so, some equitable doctrine like es…

Eeek. Didn't realize there was that delta on patents on v2 vs v3. Was aware of that problem with MIT/bsd though. Apache2 kinda is the MIT/bsd with explicit patent grants I guess.

I suppose that idemnification from code patent issues is probably part of the commercial license / product then?

Re: TokuDB open sourced

#30

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…

One big differentiating feature between TokuDB and other write optimized databases is that TokuDB is fully transactional, it is ACID compliant. There is a demand for this.

AFAIK, TokuDB is the only write-optimized transactional data store. We (I work at Tokutek) are working on integrating with MongoDB as we speak, and when we do, we will bring transactional semantics to MongoDB in addition to improved performance.

So, I think there is still a big demand out there that TokuDB will be able to meet

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