4 ms·

Distributed ACID transactions. Very good testing regime. Good performance. Basically the NewSQL dream.

by lclarkmichalek 12y ago

slantedview 12y ago
This, and there is (or was) nothing else like it in the marketplace.
- icefox 12y ago
  Well if it truly mattered out there right now there is a company that has a void that they need filling and all they have to do is speak up and help fund a replacement.
  - orand 12y ago
    That won't do much good when all the rare talent needed to build it is locked up at Apple and Google.
    - lectrick 12y ago
      There's other rare talent coming online all the time.
      - orand 12y ago
        Well in that case, this problem should solve itself any day now. /s
itchyouch 12y ago
Based on a cursory glance at the properties of ACID, it seems like something that the financial world, especially the stock exchanges, have had to deal with when dealing with transactions. I wonder if a similar architecture could be used for building a distributed database that could rival what was lost with foundation.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  Oh, we will build it, I have no doubt. There's a demand, so I'm sure in 5 years Apache will have some project that quenches our thirst. The key with transactions is that they make life easy for the client. AP systems are easy for database engineers to write (and yet they still manage to screw them up :P), but systems that support ACID constraints are easy for application developers to use. That's why FoundationDB was so special; they promised the best of both worlds; the horizontal scaling of traditional NoSQL systems, with the ease of use (w.r.t. reasoning about concurrency) of SQL/ACID systems.
- bbulkow 12y ago
  Financial services companies have three different issues: * Banks don't do multi-record SQL (see Brewer's article on the topic) * They don't do many transactions * Nobody got fired for buying oracle or DB2 An oracle replacement won't be built for financial services companies.
  - smiler 12y ago
    Can you link to Brewer's article please...
- biokoda 12y ago
  ActorDB is a distributed SQL database with ACID transactions http://www.actordb.com/ http://www.actordb.com/ and open source. Unlike FoundationDB SQL is a fundamental component and not an addon.
assface 12y ago
Mmm... they were just doing shared-data distributed MVCC. Nothing new there. My takeaway from spending some time with the documentation that their SQL layer was a hack.
jhugg 12y ago
Except the SQL part didn't work well. If you want those same features, consider VoltDB. It makes different tradeoffs on what kinds of ops are fast, but has all of those features. Essentially arbitrary two-key transactions are slower. Partition-friendly writes and global reads are faster. Global reads with real SQL can be orders of magnitude faster.

Distributed ACID transactions. Very good testing regime. Good performance. Basically the NewSQL dream.

slantedview 12y ago

This, and there is (or was) nothing else like it in the marketplace.

icefox 12y ago
Well if it truly mattered out there right now there is a company that has a void that they need filling and all they have to do is speak up and help fund a replacement.
- orand 12y ago
  That won't do much good when all the rare talent needed to build it is locked up at Apple and Google.
  - lectrick 12y ago
    There's other rare talent coming online all the time.
    - orand 12y ago
      Well in that case, this problem should solve itself any day now. /s

itchyouch 12y ago

Based on a cursory glance at the properties of ACID, it seems like something that the financial world, especially the stock exchanges, have had to deal with when dealing with transactions. I wonder if a similar architecture could be used for building a distributed database that could rival what was lost with foundation.

lclarkmichalek 12y ago
Oh, we will build it, I have no doubt. There's a demand, so I'm sure in 5 years Apache will have some project that quenches our thirst. The key with transactions is that they make life easy for the client. AP systems are easy for database engineers to write (and yet they still manage to screw them up :P), but systems that support ACID constraints are easy for application developers to use. That's why FoundationDB was so special; they promised the best of both worlds; the horizontal scaling of traditional NoSQL systems, with the ease of use (w.r.t. reasoning about concurrency) of SQL/ACID systems.
bbulkow 12y ago
Financial services companies have three different issues: * Banks don't do multi-record SQL (see Brewer's article on the topic) * They don't do many transactions * Nobody got fired for buying oracle or DB2 An oracle replacement won't be built for financial services companies.
- smiler 12y ago
  Can you link to Brewer's article please...
biokoda 12y ago
ActorDB is a distributed SQL database with ACID transactions http://www.actordb.com/ http://www.actordb.com/ and open source. Unlike FoundationDB SQL is a fundamental component and not an addon.

assface 12y ago

Mmm... they were just doing shared-data distributed MVCC. Nothing new there. My takeaway from spending some time with the documentation that their SQL layer was a hack.

jhugg 12y ago

Except the SQL part didn't work well. If you want those same features, consider VoltDB. It makes different tradeoffs on what kinds of ops are fast, but has all of those features. Essentially arbitrary two-key transactions are slower. Partition-friendly writes and global reads are faster. Global reads with real SQL can be orders of magnitude faster.