Consus: Fast Geo-Replicated Transactions
hack.systems
hack.systems
It seems that Robert Escriva (creator of Hyperdex) is now working on a new database called Consus with the following key differences[3]:
“Consus has two (three) differences from HyperDex that I believe will make it more appealing in the long run:
1. Consus doesn't separate the implementations of transactions and the regular code. Once we have a paper public on the topic and I have clearance to release the code, all of the code will be available under the same license, with no commercial fork.
2. Consus provides wide-area, geo-replicated transactions with much lower latency than is possible in any other system I know with the same consistency that Consus provides.
3. I’m still actively working on Consus; I'm not actively working on HyperDex."
[1] http://hyperdex.org/ [2] http://hyperdex.org/warp/ [3] https://github.com/rescrv/HyperDex/issues/233
*edit: should have linked to the project's homepage (http://consus.io/) which contains more details, if mods could change the link that would be great ;)
I evaluated it for a project last year, but decided not to use it. One reason was that at the time, the project seemed to have been abandoned; the author did not respond to issues or pull requests. Another was that based on Google searches, there seemed to be no one else actually using it in production; so even considering getting the commercial ACID support seemed like a big gamble, never mind that I couldn't find any info on how it performed in large clusters, and so on.
That said, it seemed technically brilliant, and fast.
If Escriva can accomplish the same thing with Consus, in a fully open source way, and gain traction enough to keep the project alive, I could see this as something I would consider using. That said, I'm wary of anyone who just abandons projects like that, without telling anyone about it.
Totally agree. I feel like there's a big void in the open-source world for this type of technology that has yet to be filled. There used to be FoundationDB and, well, we all know what happened there. CockroachDB is probably the only other active, open-source project right now that claims to have strong ACID guarantees for multi-database transactions. However, the team is not wholly focused on performance at this stage of development (which some of their early benchmarks demonstrate).
If Consus can retain some of the performance characteristics of Hyperdex while providing completely open source distributed transactions, it will be an absolute game changer.
Consus is a lexicographically sorted key-value store.
Where you will hit performance bottlenecks is when your query planner/executer makes traditional assumptions about performance that do not hold across machines.
A good SQL implementation on top of a kvs should not force you to accommodate it any more than your current "normal" databases subconsciously train you to accommodate your disks (hint: they do).
Reading through the post about active development on the predecessor HyperDex: https://github.com/rescrv/HyperDex/issues/233
> I've stopped developing the project for non-public reasons that aren't technically related to the project.
Along with this line in the blog post:
> not one in which a company with profit motives releases a half-open product, but one in which those interested in Consus can come together to build something better.
It seems like there was some friction around the commercial nature of Hyperdex.
Consus: Taming the Paxi https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03457
So there you go.