richieartoul

11 ms·

91.
by richieartoul 4y ago
You’re right about CockroachDB, my mistake. I think your characterization of Cassandra as “fully scalable” in a way that other systems are not is misleading, but I won’t argue it with you :p
92.
by richieartoul 4y ago
In my opinion the answer is unequivocally, yes, it is worth it, and developers should accept nothing less from modern databases. Even with strict serializability, developers will still be surprised by transactional behavior in distributed e
93.
by richieartoul 4y ago
I’ve had this debate with people numerous times and I think the “you don’t need strong consistency” crowd has really gotten it backwards. These same people will also agree with you that premature optimization is bad, but then argue that app
94.
by richieartoul 4y ago
It supports RocksDB also, although I think that feature is a bit more experimental.
95.
by richieartoul 4y ago
No there is much more to it than that. FoundationDB has a completely different architecture that is optimized for completely different things than Redis is. It’s not just about writing to disk vs. not. Redis is basically a very performant,
96.
by richieartoul 4y ago
FDB scales really well with reads, but it will bottleneck on writes a lot faster than you think. For write heavy workloads, Redis and Dragonfly would both leave FDB in the dust (and I say this as a big FDB user/enthusiast).
97.
by richieartoul 4y ago
The 5s timeout is annoying sometimes, but it does really support interactive transactions in the exact same sense that PostGres and MySQL do.
98.
by richieartoul 4y ago
I was pretty clear in the first paragraph that the code is a half-baked research PoC that should not be used for anything serious.
99.
by richieartoul 4y ago
It’s (very lightly) hinted at in the blog post (the section where we discuss “shard router”), but basically data locality in our pipelines by tenant + a little bit of buffering goes a long way. I’m hoping I can coax one of my colleagues who
100.
by richieartoul 4y ago
Yeah that would be cool. You could try forking an existing “SQL over key value” system like Cockroach or TiDB and replacing the KV store with FoundationDB. That is probably what I would explore first. Some of my old colleagues/friends
101.
by richieartoul 4y ago
I only mentioned M3DB because I was a maintainer of it at the time, so it’s what I was familiar with. I’m a fan of VictoriaMetrics; it’s performant and well designed. The main dev Aliaksandr is prolific, and a really nice guy to boot. I’ve
102.
by richieartoul 4y ago
Yeah that’s true, although there is a growing ecosystem of “allocation sensitive” libraries. We use this one a lot for protobuf: https://github.com/richardartoul/molecule jsonparser is great for JSON parsing: https:&#
103.
by richieartoul 4y ago
I described a modern take on an OLAP timeseries system recently here: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky... I don’t know if that helps, but contrasting those two systems might give you so
104.
by richieartoul 4y ago
This is a controversial opinion, but I’ve been generally unimpressed with the performance of real world systems written in Rust or C++. While the theoretical performance ceiling is higher, I’ve personally observed that it usually takes seve
105.
by richieartoul 4y ago
Kind of surprised how fast this took off, I wrote this 2 years ago and was showing it to a friend today who was asking how they might build an inverted index using FoundationDB and decided to repost it. If you’re looking for more examples o
106.
Time Series and FoundationDB (2019)(github.com)
247 points by richieartoul 4y ago|86 comments
107.
by richieartoul 4y ago
Not really. Clickhouse is amazing, but if you want to run it at massive scale you’ll have to invest a lot into sharding and clustering and all that. Druid is more distributed by default, but doesn’t support as sophisticated of queries as Cl
108.
by richieartoul 4y ago
I would say one major difference between those two categories of systems is that Druid/Clickhouse are designed to be deployed in "user-facing" settings directly where you can put queries to them in the critical path of your a
109.
by richieartoul 4y ago
The referenced paper on uniserve: https://petereliaskraft.net/res/uniserve.pdf is interesting, but seems to focus on systems where storage and compute are colocated, but it doesn't discuss (or maybe I skimmed too
110.
by richieartoul 5y ago
Sure, I’m not really knocking Cassandra. I’m just pointing out that Cassandras approach favors raw write throughout over everything else which is great for some use cases, but FDBs approach is much more forgiving and a better fit for many u
111.
by richieartoul 5y ago
Yeah that’s basically it. It really is a wonderful piece of free software that was (and still is) way ahead of its time in many ways. They basically made a ton of good architectural decisions really early on and then just nailed down the de
112.
by richieartoul 5y ago
"What method/protocol does foundation use for distributed consistency?" This is a really tough question to answer succinctly. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it, but the TLDR is: 1. It uses a quorum of Coord
113.
by richieartoul 5y ago
FWIW I don't think FoundationDB is based off Spanner at all (it might even predate it? I think FDB was started in 2008 or something). Its transaction handling system is completely different (and unique from what I can tell) and not dep
114.
by richieartoul 5y ago
I've never used CockroachDB, but FoundationDB has been an absolute dream to work with. There are a few downsides to using it: - There is (currently) no hosted solution you can use, so you have to run it yourself. - There is no gr
115.
by richieartoul 5y ago
I also agree that the gRPCs libraries (in all languages) tend to be opinionated, and most annoyingly, opinionated about the wrong things. That said I also haven’t found anything better either and the technology is popular enough that I stic
116.
by richieartoul 6y ago
This is one of the most subtley funny things I’ve ever seen on H.N, specifically because the target audience is so small. You have to understand both C++ memory management and what an NFT is.
117.
by richieartoul 6y ago
Is that a flash card thing? I think if you’re actively trying to “retain” knowledge like that you’re probably doing something wrong. For context I studied biochemistry in college with the intention of being pre-med and that is how I did all
118.
by richieartoul 6y ago
No intention of fetishizing or dismissing the field was intended. If you read the post I think you’ll see I’m doing the opposite. All the work I do today is predicated on a strong understanding of C.S fundamentals that you dont learn in a
119.
by richieartoul 6y ago
(Author here) Nand2tetris is pretty awesome if you don’t already have strong CS fundamentals and feel like you “know how computers work”. If you had a good C.S education though you may not get much out of it. Here is a cool one I worked on
120.
by richieartoul 6y ago
This is a fair point, I didn’t even think to consider the different tax implications. Thanks for pointing this out!

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