Any thoughts about this? It seems to be a new database system designed
from scratch to take advantage of the growth in RAM size (data sets that
fit in memory) and the availability of SSD drives. It claims to be "the
world's fastest database."
<a href="http://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/4397-memsql-80000-queries-per-second.html" title="http://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/4397-memsql-80000-queries-per-second.html">http://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/4397-memsql-80000-queries-...</a>
It's hard to see at a glance if this is a robust system suitable for
monetary transactions, or just a fast-but-lossy system that you'd use for
social twitter.
Craig
Comments
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Kevin Grittner at 06/25/2012 - 13:23Craig James < ... at emolecules dot com> wrote:
20,000 tps? Didn't we hit well over 300,000 tps in read-only
benchmarks of PostgreSQL with some of the 9.2 performance
enhancements?
-Kevin
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Greg Smith at 07/01/2012 - 00:18On 06/25/2012 01:23 PM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
It's 20K TPS on something that MySQL will only do 3.5 TPS. The queries
must be much heavier than the ones PostgreSQL can get 200K+ on. We'd
have to do a deeper analysis of the actual queries used to know exactly
how much heavier though. They might be the type MySQL is usually faster
than PostgreSQL on (i.e. ones using simple operations and operators), or
they could be ones where PostgreSQL is usually faster than MySQL (i.e.
more complicated joins). All I can tell you for sure if that they used
a query mix that makes MemSQL look much faster than MySQL.
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Scott Marlowe at 07/01/2012 - 01:00On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Greg Smith < ... at 2ndquadrant dot com> wrote:
Considering I can build a pgsql 8.4 machine with 256G RAM and 64
Opteron cores and a handful of SSDs or HW RAID that can do REAL 7k to
8k RW TPS right now for well under $10k, 20k TPS on an in memory
database isn't all that impressive. I wonder what numbers pg 9.1/9.2
can / will be able to pull off on such hardare?
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Greg Smith at 07/05/2012 - 21:45On 07/01/2012 01:00 AM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
Again, their TPS numbers are useless without a contest of how big each
transaction is, and we don't know. I can take MemSQL seriously when
there's a press release describing how to replicate their benchmark
independently. Then it's useful to look at the absolute number.
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By =?UTF-8?Q?Grzeg... at 07/03/2012 - 17:46It sounds like a lot of marketing BS :)
But I like the fact that they use modern language like C++. It is a
pain to try doing any development on postgresql. Transition to c++
would be nice (I know it's been debated on #hackers a looot).
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Josh Berkus at 06/25/2012 - 13:41On 6/25/12 10:23 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
Yes. The dirty truth is that there's nothing special, performance-wise,
about an "in memory" database except that it doesn't write to disk (or
protect your data from power-out).
In the early 00's people thought that you could build a database in some
fundamentally different way if you started with the tenet that it was
100% in memory. Hence RethinkDB, MySQL InMemory Tabletype, etc.
As it turns out, that doesn't change anything; you still need data
pages, indexes, sort routines, etc. etc. "Disk" databases don't operate
off disk; they get copied to memory, so they're already effectively "in
memory".
BTW, VoltDB's innovation is not being "in memory" (it can spill to
disk), but rather their innovative transactional clustering approach.
The new non-relational databases are "fast" on poor hardware (Amazon,
developer laptops) by cutting features and optimizing for poor (but
common) access patterns. Not by being "in memory", which is just a
side effect of not having spill-to-disk code.
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Shaun Thomas at 06/25/2012 - 13:03I personally don't put a lot of stock into this. You can get 90k+ TPS
from an old PostgreSQL 8.2 install if it's all in memory. High
transactional output itself isn't substantially difficult to achieve.
I'm also not entirely certain how this is different from something like
VoltDB, which also acts as an in-memory database with high TPS throughput.
Then there's this from the article:
"The key ideas are that SQL code is translated into C++, so avoiding the
need to use a slow SQL interpreter, and that the data is kept in memory,
with disk read/writes taking place in the background."
Besides the nonsense statement that SQL is translated to C++ (Lexical
scanners would circumvent even this step, and does that mean you have to
literally compile the resulting C++? Ridiculous.) This violates at least
the 'D' tenet of ACID. Fine for transient Facebook data, but not going
anywhere near our systems.
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By gnuoytr at 06/25/2012 - 14:02DB2 on the mainframe (if memory serves), for one, will compile static SQL to machine code. Not that unusual.
<a href="http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/DB2Precompilebind.html" title="http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/DB2Precompilebind.html">http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/DB2Prec...</a>
<a href="http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/sample-db2-cobol-compile-jcl.html" title="http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/sample-db2-cobol-compile-jcl.html">http://www.mainframegurukul.com/tutorials/database/db2_tutorials/sample-...</a>
Re: MemSQL the "world's fastest database"?
By Tom Lane at 06/25/2012 - 16:15< ... at rcn dot com> writes:
Yeah. Actually such techniques go back at least to the fifties (look up
"sort generators" sometime). They are out of fashion now because
(1) the achievable speed difference isn't what it once was, and
(2) programs that execute self-modified code are prone to seriously
nasty security issues. Get any sort of control over the code generator,
and you can happily execute anything you want.
regards, tom lane