Rackspace & Drizzle: It's Time to Rethink Everything | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace & Drizzle: It's Time to Rethink Everything

rackspacecloud.com

33 pointsangelabartels19 comments

Maybe I'm one of the rare few but I've had innodb files getting corrupted with no way to rebuild them. When my 10GB database got 100% unreadable, I gave up on MySQL for anything that's mission critical. I don't care why the DB got corrupted and why stuff like this ( http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/04/recovering-in... ) didn't work. I just don't want to ever be burned like that again. Sure I had a complete backup of the DB but it takes a long time to restore 10GB over the net.

Drizzle is using innodb too. How do I know the same thing's not gonna happen again? I much rather like the MyISAM .frm files because if one table gets corrupted, I can restore just that table from backup. Innodb corruption destroys the entire database.

Also, will Drizzle innodb finally get full-text search? That's the only reason people still use MyISAM tables. However, MyISAM locks the full-table so that becomes a bottleneck pretty soon.

Honestly, here's what I want from Rackspace and I will pay good money for it the next time I need a good SQL db: Give me a fast, reliable SQL db that works like MySQL, lets me do full-text searching without locking the whole table, and lets me change table structure without locking the whole table. Also, I don't ever want to worry about replication, syncing, sharing etc. Make this a cloud service. Amazon's SimpleDB comes nowhere close to a decent MySQL setup. Give me the features of MySQL in a cloud but without the hassles. And I'll pay for it.

Other than SimpleDB, I don't know one decent cloud db. Everyone talks about Cassandra, Redis, Postgres, and tons of other DBs but I don't want to manage yet another large database system. I want to write queries and build my app. I really think there's a big opportunity for a startup that offers a reliable cloud db service. Of course, there will be a fixed latency on every DB call but I think an overhead of 100-200ms/page is acceptable for never having to worry about the backend DB.

Honestly, here's what I want

I know it sounds crazy, but what if I had that? Who should I talk to? What should be my next step?

Do you mean, what if you had a database like the GP says he wants? You could post about it on HN and give hackers a chance to try it.

That was a thought, but I'd rather find someone interested enough to look under the hood and give me more concrete feedback.

No one better to do that than a room full of hackers who are frustrated with the alternatives. Post a link.

I'm not comfortable with a room (or more) of hackers going through it at this point. If anyone is interested, my email is in my profile.

Edit: When it goes into public beta, I'll be sure to post it here.

Appengine ?

Edit: Appengine Datastore offers the ACID properties that simpledb lacks, is hosted and massively scalable. It offers a subset of sql, and also allows to forget all sysadmin/dba stuff. It fits all the requirements of the OP

FathomDB and SQL Azure are heading into that direction but both are still in their infancy, i.e. don't even support replication. But at least there's hope that these will offer a solution in the not-too-distant future.

We at FathomDB do support replication - you can set it up yourself - we just can't yet set it up for you or monitor it. But - as you say - we're working on it.

As far as fulltext search goes, have you looked at Sphinx? http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ Plugs into MySQL and Drizzle, works really fast, and has awesome extras like stemming support.

Yeah, I've tried that and many other things. It's just yet another thing I have to worry about when I am making my app. I don't have to worry about TCP buffers or filesystems or RAM allocation. Similarly, I don't want to worry the backend that runs my app. I just want to use it.

I've been down the full text search path a few times; never fun, too many compromises and too much work. Just last week I used Sunspot solr http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot for a new site and wow, what a breath of fresh air. Its the first turnkey FTS I've found. Sunspot is a ruby lib built on solr's ruby lib. But it comes with solar embedded in the gem, scripts to startup/shutdown, complete config files...it just works!!! Add to that, my new app needed to do FTS for Chinese. I was expecting headaches and digging through Java XML hell...nope, it just worked.

Another one is Xapian (http://xapian.org/), but really why not postgres - it has very high-performance full-text search built in.

Well, you can't have it both ways. You have to do that with MySQL or any other database server, if you're being your own sysadmin. If you really don't want to deal with it, then you need to hire someone to manage it or use something like Heroku.

Does it have any improvements on table locking during ALTER operations? Or are there any other engines capable of dynamic DB schema?

Put your email in your profile or contact me.

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