Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbellis | Hacker News Reader

I agree that evaluating whether to switch to a solution now, or wait for something even better, is always a question you should ask.

But the term "vaporware" exists for a reason. Waiting for something that may or may not be everything it's promised is risky too. The Maglev ruby VM is a good example; they were demo-ing close to 10x performance a couple years ago, but when they finished implementing the fully ruby spec it was something like... 20% faster.

A lot can change when you go from demo-ware to a real production ready product. Neither Fathom nor Volt is going to be at Cassandra levels of stability in 3 months. More like a year... if things go well.

View on HN

It's you that pointed out that we're on the cusp on NoSQL convergence. I'm sure the end result of that will be better than NoSQL today, but any project merge or convergence of this kind is going to be pretty painful for those using the product along the way.

In the meantime, there's at least 3 promising projects that have announced (FathomDB, VoltDB, Drizzle), and I know of a few more as well that aren't public. My decision would be to wait, others may decide to place their bets now.

I meant it as a sincere complement - it's good marketing to draw attention to your strengths.

"any project merge or convergence of this kind is going to be pretty painful for those using the product along the way"

Only if you're using one of the non-viable products. So don't do that. :)

"there's at least 3 promising projects that have announced (FathomDB, VoltDB, Drizzle)"

Drizzle's idea of scale-out is writing a Cassandra backend, fwiw. http://drizzle.org/wiki/CassandraEngine

But last year, CouchDB was the future. Today it's Cassandra. In a few months, it could well be MongoDB or Redis. Even if Cassandra ends up the NoSQL winner, I'm pointing out that you'll have your hands full dealing with 'must have' feature contributions from the 'losing' NoSQL store users, and that this will be painful for existing Cassandra users.

As for the Drizzle thing, you've crossed the line into misleading marketing there. There is a plugin to integrate Cassandra as a Drizzle engine, just like there's a plug-in that logs MySQL error messages to Twitter. That doesn't make it the official strategy, nor does it automatically make it a good idea.

(Edit: fixed my MongoDB/CouchDB confusion!)

"But last year, CouchDB was the future. Today it's Cassandra. In a few months, it could well be MongoDB or Redis."

There's a reason you didn't see Twitter switching to CouchDB last year, and the reason is Cassandra is the only one of those four that does scale-out. So... no, "one of these things is not like the others."

"That doesn't make it the official strategy"

It makes it their only strategy at all to make it past the vapor stage. I'm not a Drizzle expert, but I do work with the core Drizzle team.

Reminder to downvoters: downvoting on HN is not intended to be used to express disagreement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com