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Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]
- oneloop 10y agoYandex is doing quite some interesting things, I think they don't get enough love from HN.
- favadi 10y agoNever seen any non-russian yandex user myself.
- oneloop 10y agoI'm non-russian and I use Metrika, their analytics product.
- elmigranto 10y agoApparently, they are big in Turkey…
- striking 10y agoHello. Nice to meet you.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- PeterisP 10y agoI don't see any other free providers of custom domain emails; so when a friend incorporated and wanted to have bob@bobscompany.com then I set him up with yandex - all "english market" services suddenly wanted a rather unreasonable business-class pricing for that simple thing.
- SSLy 10y agoas someone else mentioned: zoho. I think it's $2.5/month for unlimited domains connected to one mailbox.
- niftich 10y agoIt's not a malicious bias, but a bias nonetheless. We tend to show more love towards services we know of, use, hear about, or have a friend work at. That Yandex chiefly targets the Russian, other Cyrillic, and Turkish markets limits its exposure to people who aren't in those markets. And some of it has to do with the kitchen-sink nature of what Yandex does (a lot of tech and some media), in that it's easy to mistake them to be similar to other such companies (Yahoo, Verizon, AOL -- incidentally they're now all the same) that have a similar spread of services, and yet they're not generally complimented in their tech achievements.
- oneloop 10y agoNever heard that expression, kitchen-sink, what does it mean?
- niftich 10y agoIt technically means 'everything, whether necessary or not' [1][2], but the subtext and context I intended it in is that their range of services is forms an extremely wide spread, which could be mistaken for a lack of focus. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/everything_but_the_kitchen_sink https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/everything_but_the_kitchen_si... [2] http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/everyt...
- oneloop 10y agoThanks. Yeah ok but you could say the same thing about google and they're doing well. You have yandex mail, web analytics, ads etc. How is that different from what google is going? In fact, I would say that yandex is trying to google's roadmap on how to conquer the world and see if they can pull it off in russia with the advantage that they currently have there.
- icebraining 10y agoIt's not really different, it's just that Google became well known when it only had Search.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoYandex doesn't seem like it would appeal to the kinds of people who comment here. If you think that having your data hosted in the USA is a privacy concern, imagine having it hosted in Moscow.
- oneloop 10y agoYou seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? That's a joke. You realise that google just made location tracking mandatory for anyone using maps or app store, right? The USA is way worse in this respect. Or let me re-phrase that: we know for a FACT that the USA is very very bad in this respect, whereas Russian just has a bad reputation.
- untog 10y agoI absolutely think that data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern, yes - because while I don't doubt the governments of both countries are spying on that data, I trust the US government far more than I trust the Russian government. A useful series of tweets by @SwiftOnSecurity about why storing data in the US isn't a bad idea: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/775491205983371264?lang=en-gb https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/77549120598337126...
- oneloop 10y agoYou trust the us gov? The same that has denied manning his/her rights, driven her to suicide and now hunger strike? The same that got sweden prosecutors to re-instate assange's rape accusations after they had been independently dismissed by the initial prosecutor, so they can extradite him to the us? Ok buddy, keep trusting the us gov. I think you've been so thoroughly brain-washed by russian-hating american media that you can't even think straight any more. I realise that this isn't really an argument, but I already presented my argument (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions) and it didn't seem to make a difference, so i don't really care to continue this conversation.
- elmigranto 10y agoOverview https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/track/DBA/923.en.html https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/track/DBA/923.en.html Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SS4R1sFH3c
- jorgecastillo 10y agoYandex.Mail is my favorite email provider and I would invite anyone reading this to give it a try.
- overcast 10y agoPlease cite examples as to why it's your favorite Email provider.
- jorgecastillo 10y agoFor starters it's not very crowded on usernames, so I got to use my 'namelastname' as username, also I don't think I've seen any ads so far. Another aspect of the service I really like, is that it has less magic than Gmail. I always get email labeled wrong in Gmail. At first I tried to label them properly and expected Google to get them right over time, now I don't bother. I would definitely pay for this service if this was an option. To be fair Russia along with the US, France & Japan is one of my favorite countries, so I might be very biased.
- oneloop 10y ago> Another aspect of the service I really like, is that it has less magic than Gmail. I always get email labeled wrong in Gmail. At first I tried to label them properly and expected Google to get them right over time, now I don't bother. While I never tried yandex's email, I do share the impression that gmail is too magical and shouldn't be labelling my emails outside of the explicitly rules that i have set. > To be fair Russia along with the US, France & Japan is one of my favorite countries, so I might be very biased. Haha same here! It makes me so sad the propaganda war that russia and the us are having. Those two countries are similar in so many ways. Russia was unfortunate that communism had a successful revolution, so they are currently some 30 years behind culturally :-/
- quirkafleeg 10y ago> Russia was unfortunate that communism had a successful revolution, so they are currently some 30 years behind culturally :-/ That "unfortunate" revolution took Russia from the feudal age into the nuclear age in a single generation, so without it they'd presumably be about 100 years behind the USA. This may explain why your negative opinion of the USSR/communism is not necessarily shared by Russians. The most popular leaders of the 20th century, as voted by Russians, are Brezhnev, Lenin and Stalin, while the most unpopular are Gorbachev and Yeltsin, responsible for the collapse and break up of the USSR. Only a rigged and unfair election prevented the Communist Party leader being elected president by the people of Russia in 1996, after they had experienced the joys of several years of capitalism. In 2016, a quarter of a century after the breakup of the USSR (which happened against the express wishes of the Soviet people), the Communist Party is still the second most popular party in Russia, and most Russians (as demonstrated in repeated polls) would like to see the restoration of the USSR. As for Yandex, the founder started in business in the USSR, and he is not Russian.
- zuron7 10y agoYandex.Mail provides custom domain E-Mails for free, the only large company to do so and not to mention how good it is.
- SXX 10y agoIt's can be also used as DDNS with simple API.
- xienze 10y agoRussian email hosting. What could go wrong?
- ansgri 10y agoMail delivery delays can get huge, that's what's wrong with Yandex. Mail routinely takes 10-20 minutes to arrive.
- ivlad 10y agoI worked for Yandex. AMA. Will not violate NDA, obviously.
- technion 10y agoAre you able to say anything about the scale of their hardware? It says "3x hardware" but I'd love to hear how big that ends up being, at either the Oracle or Postgresql size.
- manigandham 10y agoTo stay on topic: Does anyone else have stories of moving massive datasets to postgres from other commercial databases? We're looking to make the switch from SQL Server when 9.6 comes out (and proves to be more scalable).
- jadbox 10y agoI'd also look into Citus (PG plugin for scaling)
- olavgg 10y agoSQL Server performs slightly better than PostgreSQL for analytics. This is mostly because of parallel queries which will still be more efficient on SQL Server when PostgreSQL 9.6 is released. On the other hand, PostgreSQL can take advantage of ZFS compression which is great for archiving cold data.
- greggyb 10y agoSQL Server also comes with SSAS, if we're talking analytics. There's the very mature MDX-based Multidimensional mode, and a heavily optimized columnstore engine with the DAX-based Tabular mode. For analytical workloads, SQL is often a poor choice. Full disclosure, I work for an analytics and BI Microsoft partner. There are plenty of great alternative semantic layers beyond SSAS, but I am not as comfortable with each of those.
- dmpk2k 10y agoMinor note: ZFS compression is great for live data too -- lz4 compression has very low CPU overhead.
- olavgg 10y agoYes and no. It depends on the use case, if you do a lot of updates, you do want a small recordsize(8kb) and if so, you do not benefit greatly from LZ4.
- niftich 10y agoSo having read through the slides, these are not bad slides, but I'm missing the 'real' wow-factor of why Postgres was a better choice in the end than Oracle. There's no doubt that the rewrite (which, because of PL/SQL -> PL/pgSQL, there was a rewrite) benefited them, but all I can glean from the slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked. So as much as I want to talk about Oracle vs. Postgres, these slides aren't giving me anything technical to debate.
- fla 10y agoPostgres is free
- syncsynchalt 10y ago10 man-years are not though. I'm a postgres fan and booster myself but I'd need a good reason to migrate a data backend on any project I'm managing.
- tw04 10y agoI don't think you realize just how painfully expensive Oracle is. The reason they only went with an active/passive server layout vs. going active/active/active RAC is because they would've had to move to enterprise licensing. Then you're talking (at what I imagine their scale is) 7-8 figures a year. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-... So if you look at just enterprise licensing, it's $47k per "processor" - which in their world, a single intel core counts as 0.5 processors. So if you've got a 36 core machine (which I think they mentioned in the video) that's 18 "processors". Or $846,000 for one box. You want clustering (RAC) - that's another $315,000. Partitioning? $207,000. So now we're up to ~$1.4 million for a single server. YAY! Obviously these are list prices, so you should be paying less than that, but it gets ugly FAST.
- meshko 10y agoit wouldn't have been 10 man years if they had less PL/SQL. I don't understand why people keep falling into that trap of putting complex logic in stored procedures.
- trollixx 10y agoI am using Yandex for my FOSS project's domain. So far, I haven't encountered any big issues. The web interface is plain and simple, but occasionally has some glitches. Their mobile app (Android) is quite pleasant and lightweight. What might be a problem for non-Russian speaking people is the lack of documentation in English. Quite often a random link redirects to a page in Russian.
- Allamaprabhu 10y agoI see that document is poorly formatted. Lacks sufficient indentation.
- coolspot 10y agoMy take aways: * Reasons to migrate were: unresponsive support, inconvenient deployment, closed source, huge cost. * It took just 10 man-years to rewrite whole project from Oracle to Postgres (e.g. 10 developers, 1 year), which is amazing. * They benefited from Postgres data versioning, arrays and composite types. * They liked writing logic on PL/pgSQL more than on Oracle PL/SQL: reduced code size, increased test coverage. * Easier deployment of changes due no library cache locks. Great thing for community is that Yandex now commited to Postgres, meaning it will get more testing and bug-fixes faster.
- anarazel 10y ago> Great thing for community is that Yandex now commited to Postgres, meaning it will get more testing and bug-fixes faster. That remains to be seen. There's a fair amount of huge postgres users that don't even bother to report bugs they find...
- postila 10y agoIt's already seen during couple of years – google author's name on postgresql.org (maillists archives)
- postila 10y agoBut you're right – a lot of such companies exist unfortunately. If Uber DBAs came to IRC or any public place (see http://Postgres.chat http://Postgres.chat) where Postgres experts are present and didn't hesitate asking questions, they would still be running Postgres.
- plorkyeran 10y agoYandex has a pretty good track record for contributing back to open source projects they use (and open-sourcing their own technologies).
- Spearchucker 10y agoI have no love for Oracle (at all, actually), but let's not kick the donkey when it's down. Having been through tech refreshes myself I'll bet most of those benefits would've been realized, regardless of data provider. Too much opportunity for a competent team to reduce or eliminate technical debt.
- blinkingled 10y ago> 3x more hardware # for Postgres Tells you something about how insanely costly Oracle's licenses are. Whatever you say about Oracle though - Oracle DB is an incredibly well performing and reliable piece of software. (Attested by experience - we had several Oracle DBs running on HP-UX Itanium that only needed to be handled when OS and Oracle patches were needed. Massively used too - think 36 PA-RISC cores at peak, 24 IA64 ones. It also helps that there are lot of DBAs with great deal of Oracle experience.)
- d0uble 10y agoNobody argues that Oracle is a very good database. But 3x more hardware and 10 man-years are an order of magnitude cheaper than Oracle licencies cost (even with maximum discount).
- blinkingled 10y agoYes that's the point I was trying to make. Licenses and support are an ongoing cost and from what I keep hearing oracle has increased them significantly in recent years.
- dangerboysteve 10y agoWhat version of Postgres did they end up using?
- d0uble 10y agoWe started our first production systems with 9.3. When we started migration process and until it ended we used 9.4. Right now all our production clusters are 9.5.
- mbesto 10y agoI look at the operations of a lot of middle market tech companies that are fairly old (10+ years in existence) and I'm starting to see more and more companies move off of Oracle and on to Postgres. I expect this trend to continue.
- leojg 10y agoThis seems good. Not related with the migration itself but I tried to use yandex and its mailing service a couple of years ago when attempting to become google independent but it didn´t work well with spanish queries so I eventually went back to google. But I recall that yandex mail was really nice.