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Comment by buremba | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they try to support both OLTP and OLAP workloads. Supporting both of these workloads requires too much work (both row and columnar storage types, different algorithms for both storage and querying etc) and they didn't even prove that autonomous systems (which is the main point of the project) can replace the existing databases.

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Great question! There happens to be an autonomous mechanism for supporting hybrid workloads (OLTP & OLAP). Peloton supports hybrid storage layouts that are automatically and dynamically adapted over time based on the workload patterns. Row and columnar storage types are special cases of hybrid storage layouts.

This is a promising area of ongoing research. If you are curious about this kind of autonomous tuning of storage layout, you might want to check this out [1].

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jarulraj/papers/2016.tile.sigmod.pdf

I guess it is a trend currently with modern MMDB's (MEMSQL,HyperDb etc) have support for both OLTP & OLAP workloads. You can checkout the git repo give it a spin see if it hold up to the claims.

http://www.memsql.com/ does this today. Fast, distributed, rowstore + columnstore, relational database with mysql protocol.

However Peloton also aims to be an autonomous system. That's a lot for undergrad and grad students so I'm not sure if he wants Peloton to be stable in a near future.

Also fits in the niche between people who want both possibilities - though the onus is on the authors to show that it actually is just as good

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