Zvents Releases Open Source Cluster Database Based on Google

An anonymous reader writes "Local search engine company, Zvents, has released an open source distributed data storage system based on Google's released design specs. 'The new software, Hypertable, is designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs [...] The Google database design on which Hypertable is based, Bigtable, attracted a lot of developer buzz and a "Best Paper" award from the USENIX Association for "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" a 2006 publication from nine Google researchers including Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Google's Bigtable uses the company's in-house Google File System for storage.'"

Kitten Nipples

[milsoRgen]

..designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs...

I'm just curious if anyone has had any experiance with these types of systems using commodity PCs, how is performance and does how well does it scale as you increase the amount of nodes?

how useful is DHT?

[convolvatron]

i've been interested in this question for the last few years. how much do people value the ability to use a relational language and transactional consistency, or for most of these uses are these things just historical artifacts?

Re:Kitten Nipples

[Idiot with a gun]

IIRC, Paypal and Google both use commodity PCs in clusters like this. Google uses something similar to above (duh), and Paypal uses a 3 tiered, multi-PC setup (Database, caching layer, and application side layers, respectively).

Re:how useful is DHT?

[ShieldW0lf]

i've been interested in this question for the last few years. how much do people value the ability to use a relational language and transactional consistency, or for most of these uses are these things just historical artifacts?

In the 7 years I've been working in the industry, I've never delivered a single project that I would trust to a non-ACID database. Ever. And I doubt I ever will. If you want something that will generate some marketing material at high speed, and if it fails, who cares, well, use MySQL. If you want to do something that can handle a million pithy comments and if some of them get lost in the shuffle, who cares, well, that's fine too. Use whatever serves fast. If you're running Google, and it doesn't matter if a node drops out because there is no "right" answer to get wrong in the first place as long as you spit out a bunch of links, well, these sorts of non-resilient systems are fine.

Personally, I've never done projects like that. In my projects, if the data isn't perfect always and forever, it's worse than if it had never been written. It's very existence is a liability, because people will rely on it when they shouldn't, for things that can't get by with "close".

So yes. Transactional consistency and a solid relational model are pretty much mandatory, and not going anywhere soon. The idea that they might be replaced by technology such as this is laughable.

Wheel: reinvented

[stonecypher]

Mnesia has been able to handle things far in excess of the numbers cited, and with far better control of placement, for more than a decade. So has KDB. Also Coral8. This wouldn't even be on the map if people didn't start drooling the second they heard "based on Google." When they find out it's unstable and in alpha?

Yawn.