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Not all GPU databases are created equal. Notwithstanding the amazing functionality of Postgres and the impressive work of the PGStrom team, afaik they are still
by tmostak 11y ago
Not all GPU databases are created equal. Notwithstanding the amazing functionality of Postgres and the impressive work of the PGStrom team, afaik they are still limited to a single GPU and do not cache data on board the GPU. It certainly makes Postgres much faster but is still likely one to two orders of magnitude slower than something like MapD that runs on up to 16 GPUs per server and caches hot data in GPU RAM.
Disclosure: I am the CEO of MapD.
- fsaintjacques 11y agoI'm interested in knowing what subset of SQL MapD supports. How does it handle expressions on strings and complex data types (tstamp zoned, dates?), etc.
- tmostak 11y agoIt can do most of the basic expressions on strings (i.e. like/ilike) and can do the standard time operations (date_trunc, extract), with the goal of being fully SQL-92 compliant this year. You have to remember that many of our customers use us with our visual analytics frontend - they don't care about what happens behind the scenes, just that they can interactively explore billions of records with near-zero lag. I'm a huge fan of PostgreSQL and certainly if you need an ACID transactional database with the latest SQL support and extensions you can't go wrong. But if you need the fastest analytics performance there might be more-suitable platforms. Different tools for different jobs.
- fsaintjacques 11y agoAnd how does it handle mutability, is it purely read-only, partial append support, full delete/update support?
- tmostak 11y agoHandles fast append (insert) - can stream large volumes of data in while running queries (one of the advantages of executing on GPU - you leave the CPU free to handle ingest). Delete/Update in-flight.
- swasheck 11y ago> I'm a huge fan of PostgreSQL and certainly if you need an ACID transactional database with the latest SQL support This answered my question. So now for the follow-up. Are they limited to one core because their goal is to be ACID? As much as people like to blame performance on the tenets of ACID, it's still pretty important for a great deal of things.
- anarazel 11y agoQueries are not limited to a single core anymore in the upcoming 9.6 release. There's a lot more that can be parallelized than what's in 9.6 though (sorting most importantly probably).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dfsegoat 11y agoI had not come across you guys yet -- thanks for sharing.
- petra 11y agoAs an expert, how do you view FPGA vs GPU acceleration for databases ?
- tmostak 11y agoI'm not an expert on FPGAs, but in general they have much less memory bandwidth than GPUs. Since many queries are memory-bound, I would suspect that would make them less suitable than GPUs for generic SQL.