MemSQL Makers Say They've Created the Fastest Database On the Planet 377
mikejuk writes "Two former Facebook developers have created a new database that they say is the world's fastest and it is MySQL compatible. According to Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov, MemSQL, the database they have developed over the past year, is thirty times faster than conventional disk-based databases. MemSQL has put together a video showing MySQL versus MemSQL carrying out a sequence of queries, in which MySQL performs at around 3,500 queries per second, while MemSQL achieves around 80,000 queries per second. The documentation says that MemSQL writes back to disk/SSD as soon as the transaction is acknowledged in memory, and that using a combination of write-ahead logging and snapshotting ensures your data is secure. There is a free version but so far how much a full version will cost isn't given." (See also this article at SlashBI.)
Re:Err... what? (Score:5, Informative)
Just leaves me with the question, what are they trying to get out of this BS?
Your money, its not a free piece of software.
Re:okay...? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Show me vs a real DB engine (Score:5, Informative)
Show me benchmarks vs Oracle, PostgreSQL or SQLServer. Spare me the comparison with MySQL or some other toy.
I think the reason the comparison to MySQL is appropriate is that this database is supposed to be MySQL compatible.
Re:Show me vs a real DB engine (Score:5, Informative)
Filesystem anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
Remember the good old days, when XYZ-db wasn't always available (or even disirable)? we used to use files.
Yea, files. Novel concept, these days, mention ISAM to someone and they don't know what you're talking about!
If you really need speed, maybe a database isn't your best bet. Maybe, just maybe, you should consider structuring the data in a way that makes sense for your application using files.
Re:Ya Don't Say! (Score:5, Informative)
The third is to store regular InnoDB tables on a ramdisk. This can be crazy fast, but it also means that if your server crashes or loses power, you're *fucked*
Not necessarily. There are battery-backed volatile RAM devices that can last for days, and also non-volatile RAM devices like F-RAM and MRAM.
Battery backed volatile RAM can even be considered "cheap" - if the bottleneck are in tables small enough to fit on these, or the amount of overall writes is so high that placing the innodb logs there makes sense, it can be cheaper than a RAID10 or 50 of high-speed SAS drives.
The HyperCard / ACARD drives, for example, are only $300 plus RAM. And if the worst happens, you can even dump the RAM to a CF card before the battery runs out.
Re:How do they write to disk faster? (Score:5, Informative)
SSD is significantly faster than HDD at both sequential and random writes. Top 15K SAS drives write ~250MB/s sequential. Top SSD write 550MB/s sequential. Write random and it gets much worse for the SAS drive. Try to even find an enterprise HDD benchmark done in the last year. No one bothers because enterprise buys SSD if they care about performance.
Re:okay...? (Score:5, Informative)
*woosh*
The Devil Is In The Detail (Score:4, Informative)
I've had a love-hate relationship with MySQL for over ten years now, and have as much cause to hate it as anyone, but I have to point this out. Read the MemSQL docs carefully, and here's the killer - they only support single-query transactions, and only at isolation level READ COMMITTED.
Until those two facts change, then its hardly a fair comparison.
Re:Ya Don't Say! (Score:4, Informative)
For those who don't get the reference:
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale
Re:Ya Don't Say! (Score:2, Informative)
I'm gonna call BS on this one. Why would a ram disc need a fan?
MacOS System 6 had RAMdisk applications available for it (one was called AppDisk), and by System 7 this functionality was built into the OS via a system control panel. The software allowed you to donate whatever RAM you had available to a disk that mounted on the desktop. You could use it for cache files, or copy entire applications to it to run at blazing speeds off the RAMdisk instead off the comparatively slow SCSI-1 HDD, or the mind-numbingly slow floppy disk drive. In 1989, when RAM was prohibitively expensive, if you had a Mac IIfx (not publicly available until 1990) or Mac SE/30 and were very wealthy, you could have a desktop with 128MB of RAM (along with the MODE32 control panel that allowed the SE/30 to see all that memory, or the ROM from a Mac IIfx or Mac IIsi which accomplished the same thing, unless you ran A/UX which was natively 32-bit clean), and with the RAMdisk software you could designate amounts up to whatever the system didn't need to be used as a RAMdisk... say... about 120MB, which at the time would have been about as large as the biggest HDDs available to consumers. You can still find this software on Gamba's site. [earthlink.net]
To answer your question, the Mac Plus was an AIO or all-in-one computer. I'm not sure if you are old enough to know or remember what a cathode ray tube [wikipedia.org] is, but the Mac Plus used one as a display, and it generated a substantial amount of heat, requiring a fan to cool the machine.
Also, RAM itself will generate some heat, usually not enough to need its own fan, and RAM in a Mac Plus didn't have a dedicated fan. A RAMdisk is not the same as an SSD, which runs off the disk bus. Like RAM, a RAMdisk runs off the system bus... generally much faster than the disk bus.
Re:A nice approach perhaps... (Score:2, Informative)
AFAIK, that's how any decent DB system works.
Yes, but he said MySQL...