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but you can pick up the phone and an Oracle salesperson will sell you the physical device that you're implying can't exist. Well, thing is, part of your claim

by moe 17y ago

but you can pick up the phone and an Oracle salesperson will sell you the physical device that you're implying can't exist. Well, thing is, part of your claim (if I understood it correctly) is that I just throw my data and my queries at your wonder-device and it will magically be fast and scale. You never mention any special care I must take, you even explicitly say it's not partitioning. This is decidedly not the case with what said Oracle salesperson will sell to me. The sale will normally include an expensive support-contract and probably a dedicated DB Admin. Because operating a RAC- or Exadata Cluster is, for all I know, far from trivial. You still have to make a bunch of critical decisions and tradeoffs upfront or it will probably suck. Moreover you're effectively saying that you solved what Amazon and Google either couldn't or didn't bother to solve with their SimpleDB and Appengine Datastore offerings. Still sounds like quite a bold claim to me. But as said elsewhere, I appreciate that you're standing by it and will keep looking forward to what you will unveil. Just one more thing that I really don't understand: If you have this doomsday device at your hands, then why on earth do you bother with MySQL hosting as a secondary product?

gfodor 17y ago
You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. The fact that you can scale the relational model using Oracle's software, with or without a support contract or appropriate tuning measures, is sufficient evidence to invalidate the claim that many make that the relational model does not scale. The relational model != ACID. The relational model != SQL. The relational model has nothing in it implicitly that ruins it's ability to obey CAP. You are right, that you will have to make some consistency tradeoffs to get partition tolerance. Again, to repeat, this has nothing to do with the relational model itself, just with the CAP theorem. Just because it is hard to build a RDBMS that loosens ACID but scales and is much easier to build a ad-hoc non-formally-defined model like that seen in Cassandra or BigTable does not mean it is impossible. You simply have to pay for it, in software, hardware, and consulting fees. Nothing is stopping the open source world from making PostgreSQL or MySQL scale out other than time, energy, and perhaps a seminal paper or two out of acadamic that provide foundational models that are necessary to implement it correctly. Odds are, they've done this work at Oracle, but it's not available for obvious reasons.
- moe 17y ago
  You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. Well, it seems you're misreading mine now. does not mean it is impossible. I never said that. If you re-read my post you will see that I was merely wondering about their claim of not just meeting the goalposts set by Oracle et al but of exceeding them by a large margin. As I understood it their new system is supposedly not only maintenance-free, but also efficient regardless of the workload or schema that I, as a user, might throw at it. And all that supposedly hosted on commodity VMs in a cloud (probably EC2). That's about as bold a claim as it gets in database-land, so if I was reading too much into it then feel free to correct me on that, but please don't suggest I said something that I never said. To put it into perspective (again): I would think both Google and Amazon have probably also thought long and hard about this problem. A full fledged SQL Store would be a much more sexy offering than their crippled SimpleDB/Datastore solutions after all. There's also a good amount of academic research in the area, with Cassandra (Dynamo/BigTable) seemingly being what many people consider the best we can currently do in terms of linear scalability on commodity hardware - at the cost of not having SQL and no ACID. So here comes this startup out of the blue, claiming to have solved all these things. Yes, leaps like that happen sometimes. Google happened, too, after all. But I think my skepticism is not completely unjustified either? Hence my question which tradeoff FathomDB chose to make, to get at least a basic idea about what to expect.
  - wmf 17y ago
    SimpleDB and App Engine are geo-distributed, but it looks like FathomDB isn't.
    - moe 17y ago
      While that may be true I don't see how it relates. From what we know FathomDB claims linear, cost-efficient scalability over a fully featured relational database. That's quite a feat, even if you do it "only" in one location.

by moe 17y ago

gfodor 17y ago

You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. The fact that you can scale the relational model using Oracle's software, with or without a support contract or appropriate tuning measures, is sufficient evidence to invalidate the claim that many make that the relational model does not scale. The relational model != ACID. The relational model != SQL. The relational model has nothing in it implicitly that ruins it's ability to obey CAP. You are right, that you will have to make some consistency tradeoffs to get partition tolerance. Again, to repeat, this has nothing to do with the relational model itself, just with the CAP theorem. Just because it is hard to build a RDBMS that loosens ACID but scales and is much easier to build a ad-hoc non-formally-defined model like that seen in Cassandra or BigTable does not mean it is impossible. You simply have to pay for it, in software, hardware, and consulting fees. Nothing is stopping the open source world from making PostgreSQL or MySQL scale out other than time, energy, and perhaps a seminal paper or two out of acadamic that provide foundational models that are necessary to implement it correctly. Odds are, they've done this work at Oracle, but it's not available for obvious reasons.

moe 17y ago
You're misreading his argument or are being deliberately obtuse. Well, it seems you're misreading mine now. does not mean it is impossible. I never said that. If you re-read my post you will see that I was merely wondering about their claim of not just meeting the goalposts set by Oracle et al but of exceeding them by a large margin. As I understood it their new system is supposedly not only maintenance-free, but also efficient regardless of the workload or schema that I, as a user, might throw at it. And all that supposedly hosted on commodity VMs in a cloud (probably EC2). That's about as bold a claim as it gets in database-land, so if I was reading too much into it then feel free to correct me on that, but please don't suggest I said something that I never said. To put it into perspective (again): I would think both Google and Amazon have probably also thought long and hard about this problem. A full fledged SQL Store would be a much more sexy offering than their crippled SimpleDB/Datastore solutions after all. There's also a good amount of academic research in the area, with Cassandra (Dynamo/BigTable) seemingly being what many people consider the best we can currently do in terms of linear scalability on commodity hardware - at the cost of not having SQL and no ACID. So here comes this startup out of the blue, claiming to have solved all these things. Yes, leaps like that happen sometimes. Google happened, too, after all. But I think my skepticism is not completely unjustified either? Hence my question which tradeoff FathomDB chose to make, to get at least a basic idea about what to expect.
- wmf 17y ago
  SimpleDB and App Engine are geo-distributed, but it looks like FathomDB isn't.
  - moe 17y ago
    While that may be true I don't see how it relates. From what we know FathomDB claims linear, cost-efficient scalability over a fully featured relational database. That's quite a feat, even if you do it "only" in one location.