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While I do recognize this is a marketing piece for HyperDex, I'm disappointed HyperDex only chooses to compare itself with MongoDB and Cassandra. It would be

While I do recognize this is a marketing piece for HyperDex, I'm disappointed HyperDex only chooses to compare itself with MongoDB and Cassandra. It would be different if HyperDex was fully open source and free, but its not. The "transaction" feature is only available with a license, which in most cases will price you out of any developer who is looking to start a bitcoin exchange. So unfortunately it comes across as "If only you had spent $x/mo, buying our product, then you wouldn't have had this problem!" Now that isn't bad, and its the definition of marketing, but then it goes on to compare itself against Cassandra (which has a widely different use case in the wild) and Mongo (which is already the whipping boy of the database community). However it doesn't help the use cases are also extremely well served by something like Postgres, which doesn't need a Warp addon, and has a huge developer community. What I would be more interested in, is how does HyperDex compare with the new "NoSQL" databases (FoundationDB, OrientDB, Spanner-like Databases) or even the traditional commercial SQL like Oracle. In short, it doesn't help to test and compare unsuccessful and unpopular use cases with these technologies. Most competent people, the same people who might pay for HyperDex, already know Cassandra is bad at transactions. What I would like to see is tell me why someone like Netflix, or Ooyala (tried, tested and popular use cases) would move from Cassandra to HyperDex.

threeseed 13y ago
Cassandra's transaction support has been improving pretty rapidly. http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in-cassandra-2-0 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in...
- grizzles 13y ago
  For what I can only guess are strategic reasons, Datastax is moving away from the schema-less design that made Cassandra popular with early adopters. There are workarounds to this deprecation such as using the old Thrift API, but it doesn't really inspire confidence in the product unless the new schema oriented way of doing things appeals to you. PS those aren't transactions.
  - teacup50 13y ago
    "Schema-less" is a hack that appeals to people that don't realize that there is always schema. It's just a question of whether you want your data model to be ambiguous and poorly defined, or explicit.
    - nevi-me 13y ago
      Schema-less also means that you can afford to have deviations in your schemas not hinder your development needs. I agree with you, but I'd venture to say that a schema-less database means what it does, but that a collection of data always has schemas.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 13y ago
        No, the schema is always a property of the system as a whole, data alone doesn't have an implicit schema. The schema is the set of type constraints that data has to conform to so that it can be processed by the system. Thus, a DB being "schema-less" simply means that it won't check/enforce those constraints - the schema still is there, of course, simply because a given piece of software that does anything meaningful will not sensibly process any random piece of garbage you feed it.
        nevi-me 13y ago
        So no schema means no validation of data for conformance? I thought these "NoSQL", or rather the ones that explicitly state to be schema-less don't do such. People who take the lack of schema as the licence to throw data into a black hole are somehow misleading themselves. The purpose of a database is to store data for later retrieval and modification. Schema-less, as we both understand it, means there is little or no validation by the database. In light of what you corrected me on data, am I correct in saying that useful data at the very least has to conform to some uniformity, from which a DBA would derive a schema, even if not enforced by the database?
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 13y ago
JohnTHaller 13y ago
> It would be different if HyperDex was fully open source and free, but its not. The "transaction" feature is only available with a license, which in most cases will price you out of any developer who is looking to start a bitcoin exchange. So unfortunately it comes across as "If only you had spent $x/mo, buying our product, then you wouldn't have had this problem!" Just use PostreSQL. Open source. Free. ACID compliant.

threeseed 13y ago

Cassandra's transaction support has been improving pretty rapidly. http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in-cassandra-2-0 http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/lightweight-transactions-in...

grizzles 13y ago
For what I can only guess are strategic reasons, Datastax is moving away from the schema-less design that made Cassandra popular with early adopters. There are workarounds to this deprecation such as using the old Thrift API, but it doesn't really inspire confidence in the product unless the new schema oriented way of doing things appeals to you. PS those aren't transactions.
- teacup50 13y ago
  "Schema-less" is a hack that appeals to people that don't realize that there is always schema. It's just a question of whether you want your data model to be ambiguous and poorly defined, or explicit.
  - nevi-me 13y ago
    Schema-less also means that you can afford to have deviations in your schemas not hinder your development needs. I agree with you, but I'd venture to say that a schema-less database means what it does, but that a collection of data always has schemas.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 13y ago
      No, the schema is always a property of the system as a whole, data alone doesn't have an implicit schema. The schema is the set of type constraints that data has to conform to so that it can be processed by the system. Thus, a DB being "schema-less" simply means that it won't check/enforce those constraints - the schema still is there, of course, simply because a given piece of software that does anything meaningful will not sensibly process any random piece of garbage you feed it.
      - nevi-me 13y ago
        So no schema means no validation of data for conformance? I thought these "NoSQL", or rather the ones that explicitly state to be schema-less don't do such. People who take the lack of schema as the licence to throw data into a black hole are somehow misleading themselves. The purpose of a database is to store data for later retrieval and modification. Schema-less, as we both understand it, means there is little or no validation by the database. In light of what you corrected me on data, am I correct in saying that useful data at the very least has to conform to some uniformity, from which a DBA would derive a schema, even if not enforced by the database?
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 13y ago

JohnTHaller 13y ago

> It would be different if HyperDex was fully open source and free, but its not. The "transaction" feature is only available with a license, which in most cases will price you out of any developer who is looking to start a bitcoin exchange. So unfortunately it comes across as "If only you had spent $x/mo, buying our product, then you wouldn't have had this problem!" Just use PostreSQL. Open source. Free. ACID compliant.