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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

#91

Post by nlavezzo »

coffeemug wrote: post #74
rbranson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to preface my comment: this is impressive work, congratulations on shipping, and this is what MongoDB should have been from the start. In reality, most transactional database deployments are heavily skewed towards read workload, so reading from hot slaves is basically a requirement for master/slave databases. So, in most real world applications at scale, apps already deal with inconsistencies between slaves an…

I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I also think there's enormous value in making easy things be really easy. Even with today's state of the art adding a shard, dealing with consistency issues, adding replicas, etc. is relatively hard. Perhaps not in a computer-sciency sense (all the problems are fairly well understood), but in an operational sense. Lots and lots of work needs to be done even with systems lik…

Congratulations on shipping - looks like a very well thought out product.

Regarding your last comment on high-performance distributed ACID, that's what we've built at FoundationDB, although FoundationDB is a key value store so transactions are multi/cross-key instead of cross-document.

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

#92

Post by jdoliner »

szopa wrote: post #67

Nice work! It seems that you are well aware of the tradeoffs that you are taking and communicating it openly in your documentation (and your choices seem to be very reasonable). I really like the tone of your communication – it seems essentially BS/koolaid free. 1. How much data can you put in one instance before seeing performance degradation? I know that you still working on good benchmarks – but do you have any ba…

Hi, here to answer question number 4.

Short answer: Our configuration data is most similar to git. Any machine can be used as an administrative node via the WebUI or the CLI. It will make changes to the metadata which then get pushed to the other nodes. If 2 nodes make conflicting changes you get a conflict which the system will help you to merge.

Long Answer Cluster configuration is stored in semilattices which are a neat mathematical structure with a few very desirable properties. Semilattices support have a join operator. For our cluster metadata joining is the means by which metadata is updated. When one server connects to another the two swap metadata and each joins the other's metadata into his own. In essence learning what the other knows.

There are two properties in particular of the joining that are nice. First off joining is commutative. This means machines can exchange data in whatever order they want and get the same result at the end. Secondly they're indempotent. That means machines can resend their data without fear. The value doesn't change if the same value is joined in twice. These help us with a lot of the worries of distributed systems.

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

#93

Post by jdoliner »

coffeemug wrote: post #77
szopa wrote: post #67

Nice work! It seems that you are well aware of the tradeoffs that you are taking and communicating it openly in your documentation (and your choices seem to be very reasonable). I really like the tone of your communication – it seems essentially BS/koolaid free. 1. How much data can you put in one instance before seeing performance degradation? I know that you still working on good benchmarks – but do you have any ba…

1. As long as active dataset everything fits in RAM, performance will be great. E.g. you can have terabytes of data but as long as the actively accessed dataset is 2. We do do block-level replication. On each node of the btree we store replication timestamps. When a node asks for new data, we can cull away parts of the tree the node has almost instantly. So replication is very very efficient for most OLTP workloads.…

Small correction to this. There actually wasn't a library for JS we had to write that for ourselves.

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

#94

Post by d0m »

I absolutely love the website. Congrats on the public launch. In the FAQ, I would suggest a "How do you compare with Mongo?" I've read the intro, the faq and a couple of quick guides to find out what was different (read better). If I'm a happy mongo user, why would I switch to RethinkDB?

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

#95

Post by reinhardt »

mmorearty wrote: post #13

I don't know much about RethinkDB yet, but I will say that I have been a big fan (online) of one of its founders, Slava Akhmechet, for years. I've never met him, but he wrote some terrific articles on his website, http://www.defmacro.org/ , a few years ago. Start at the bottom of the list of articles, with "The Nature of Lisp." Slava is a deep thinker, which makes me very excited to take a look at RethinkDB.

So is RethinkDB written in Lisp?

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

#96

Post by dbuxton »

shawn-butler wrote: post #83
tcwc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSON support in Postgres is currently limited to a validated plain text field, it doesn't let you efficiently query inside the json object.

While technically correct I assume the parent was referring to hstore [0] which has both GIST and GIN indexes as well as btree and hash for equality. With some simple formatting functions (its just json after all) it's sixes to me. [0] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/hstore.html

hstore is great, I won't hear a word against it, but it doesn't deal with complex nested objects like JSON can (I would love to be wrong about this) - it's just a key/value store with indexing of the objects inside.

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

#97

Post by alexpopescu »

d0m wrote: post #94

I absolutely love the website. Congrats on the public launch. In the FAQ, I would suggest a "How do you compare with Mongo?" I've read the intro, the faq and a couple of quick guides to find out what was different (read better). If I'm a happy mongo user, why would I switch to RethinkDB?

1. If you are a happy mongo user, we'd still be happy to hear your feedback about RethinkDB.

2. We're putting together some comparisons, hope to add them to the site soon.

3. There are already a couple of answers to this question on this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764137

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4763939

alex @ rethinkdb

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

#98

Post by shykes »

I am very excited about this. The RethinkDB team is rock-solid and the market is only going to get bigger.

I particularly like the perspective of an easy onramp to get started, knowing that I will never have to leave because of scale or reliability.

Please, please give me a SQL adapter! My marketing team needs SQL. My business app developers need SQL. Give them an adapter and I will get them to use RethinkDB - knowing that 1) my data is safe and I'm not 6 months away from a painful re-architecture and migration, and 2) as my developers hit the limits of SQL they can gradually (gradually!) peel the paint off and start using your more powerful query language.

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

#99

Post by NathanKP »

reinhardt wrote: post #95
mmorearty wrote: post #13

I don't know much about RethinkDB yet, but I will say that I have been a big fan (online) of one of its founders, Slava Akhmechet, for years. I've never met him, but he wrote some terrific articles on his website, http://www.defmacro.org/ , a few years ago. Start at the bottom of the list of articles, with "The Nature of Lisp." Slava is a deep thinker, which makes me very excited to take a look at RethinkDB.

So is RethinkDB written in Lisp?

No according the website it is written in C++.

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

#100

Post by haberman »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
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.

Releasing a project like this means working very hard for a long time without anybody patting you on the back saying you're doing a good job. It's exhausting, a labour of love. Get it now?

As someone who's been doing that for several years on a side project that I believe in, this really hit home.
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