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Don't let me barge in and tell you how to do your job or anything, but for a piece of a system designed and marketed as the bottom, super stable piece of the st
by hbrundage 10y ago
Don't let me barge in and tell you how to do your job or anything, but for a piece of a system designed and marketed as the bottom, super stable piece of the stack, shipping out a brand new technology not yet in trunk seems kind of dangerous, no? The MVCC implementations in your competitors have been battle tested for stability and maximum performance for decades. Gonna be hard to compete with that.
Re: "struggles over high-latency, low-reliability WAN connections" If by struggle you mean a vanilla MySQL replication setup doesn't satisfy C, A and P of the CAP theorem then yeah I agree, however if you just mean that it struggles to be consistent with an unreliable network, that just means MySQL has made the same CAP tradeoff Bedrock has. AFAIK there aren't many critical bugs that mean you lose data that could have otherwise been stored in the presence of unreliable networks.
You're right that vanilla MySQL doesn't support automatic failover, however, some consider that a feature, because the engineering required to correctly implement this distributed system is genuinely challenging. Bedrock may have done it, but if there are some complicated cases that it has yet to address users may prefer to manage failover manually before they trust it to the system. MySQL also isn't the only system that we should draw comparison too -- Cassandra or Riak come to mind as well. Both have excellent replication for geo-redundancy and something akin to automatic failover by storing data in a configurable number of places. They don't support raw SQL statements like Bedrock does, but to be honest if Bedrock doesn't support actual SQL fanout where the results can be combined to make the thing seem like one big database, the client is left to do a bunch of the work like they would be doing in Cassandra to model their data and fetch it efficiently.
I'm not trying to suggest that MySQL or a MySQL orchestration layer is better than Bedrock for all use cases; I just don't understand what niche Bedrock is trying to fill. For basic consumers of the system it's more work to author your queries for Bedrock because (I think) you now have to manage multiple logical SQL instances instead of one virtual big one, and you only get as much read throughput for as much data as you are willing to duplicate. You only get write throughput for the same but at 1 writer per shard/slave/whatever it's called. It's using a homegrown replication algorithm that has the same consistency tradeoffs of other more widely deployed and thus better tested solutions, and it's not clear that database builders or the target audience for Bedrock-as-framework would actually want to use SQLite due to the performance considerations mentioned above.
- quinthar 10y agoLots of comments! I'll try to address the key points: Re: "brand new technology not yet in trunk" -- I'm not sure what you mean by that. Bedrock has been used continuously for 8 years. Re: "struggles over high-latency, low-reliability WAN connections" -- Ah, I mean MySQL's replication is designed for active/passive deployments with manual failover connected via fast/reliable networks. Not saying it can't support slow/unreliable WAN connections, only that it requires a lot of glue code and manual recovery when things go more wrong thn it's designed to handle. Re: "the engineering required to correctly implement this distributed system is genuinely challenging" -- Agreed! This is precisely what Bedrock provides. Re: "SQL fanout" -- To my knowledge, no RDBMS does this automatically. Furthermore, very few real world applications actually require this. Don't get me wrong: this is cool stuff. But this isn't a common requirement. Most businesses will never exceed the capacity of a single server -- the number of businesses that truly require this level of scalability is very small. Re: "I just don't understand what niche Bedrock is trying to fill." -- The niche of businesses that want a simple SQL database that has built in automatic failover. Re: "multiple logical SQL instances" -- I'm not sure what you mean by this. Bedrock maintains a single contiguous SQL database across all nodes. Re: "you only get as much read throughput for as much data as you are willing to duplicate" -- Yes, I'm saying there are very few reasons not to duplicate it all for the vast majority of real world use cases. Thanks!