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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

SSDs?

A HDD is limited to well under a thousand reads per second, and there's multiple reads per SQL select, so I'll assume either yes or you're leaving something out. If the tens of thousands of reads are over a 4MB table that stays in memory and the rest of your 10TB are infrequently accessed, congrats, you have a single-node problem. If you actually need to deliver, say, 1,000 queries per second over a 10TB dataset? It's not happening in an RDBMS unless you get a whole bunch of SSDs.

Also, RE: websites, of course, substitute your environment's front end if you'd like.

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At Microsoft we were scaling SQL Server up to 10-100k rows per second on OLTP $20k systems with a hot cache and RAIDed HDDs.

In one of the code-word projects I saw an $25k system with an OLTP dataset do 1 billion rows in a second.

Edit: We also had statistics that said that 90% of our customers had less than 100GB of data. 99% had < 1 TB. The vast majority of database users shouldn't even be thinking about looking at non-RDBMS systems.

I agree with all of that. But the original poster was claiming 10k SELECTs/second on a 10TB data set. That just sounds fishy to me.

If your dataset fits in memory on one node, I'm all about using a database (prefer MySQL personally, might look at postgres now that it finally has replication).

Do you really need SSD's to do a thousand reads per second? I'm assuming this is with a hot cache, and the access pattern on the 10TB of data is pretty heavily skewed towards a much smaller portion of the total dataset. Also, RAID-ed 15K drives, and the nature of the queries matter. We don't really know enough about the whole setup to know what's possible.

Its year 2010, we've invented RAID a while back. Stripe and mirror everything and you get decent performance without SSD.

It depends on how much performance you need vs how much capacity you need. Since SSDs can do more I/O in a single drive, even if that drive costs twice as much it will still make more sense than a 4 drive RAID array, for both price and power.

Ah, I love SSDs. I was just pointing out that they are not the only game in town.

Ok, you're up to 3k random reads per second at the absolute peak. Realistically more like 2k for 6x10k disks at RAID 0, and it's awfully hard to even fit 10TB on a RAID1+0 setup. What's that, 10x2TB? Good luck with the latencies on those 2TB disks.

Still doesn't add up to 10k select statements per second over a 10TB dataset on a singlenode. Even without writes, that's not happening. I call BS on grandparent post.

That shows a lack of understanding of what kind of hardware is being used in the real world to handle this.

With a half-decent SAN with 15k drives and 4Gbit fibrechannel connections, you can get 1000+ IOPS without the storage system even breaking a sweat. Under load it can easily give 10 times that.

This is something that's everywhere in the business world.

Pair this with a bunch of cores and a few GB of memory, and you can have an RDBMS that chews through impressive amounts of data. Unless, of course, you optimize nothing and swamp it with lame queries that do nothing that table scans. Funny enough, the same people that are fine with doing everything in code are the ones that can't be bothered to think more than one second about what kind of queries they are throwing at the database.

No kidding, it's like a battery backed write cache doesn't even exist in the NoSQL world. I was able to easily drive 200MB/sec of random IO on 25 15K drives.

Btw, this was 200MB/sec of random writes. I didn't even bother with random writes. I could have gotten the writes to be basically sequential if I had bothered to write a COMB style UUID generator. I happen to be a fan of UUIDs for the surrogate keys as it makes database merging so much easier.

Well, yeah, you can get some decent IOPS for 100k, but 20 servers with 4 spindles a piece are still more.

You will also consume more power, and have 20 servers to manage instead of one, and you have to customize your data to be distributed between those 20 servers, hampering the possibility of querying that data for patterns that enable you to optimize your business.

6 disks? An EMC array can throw 20x as many physical disks at this sort of problem. An Exadata can compile SQL down to microcode and execute it on the storage, like a graphics card doing matrix operations on dedicated hardware.

Again, as I say, the NoSQL crowd have no idea about what the state of the art is in the RDBMS world.

it's awfully hard to even fit 10TB on a RAID1+0 setup

It would actually be hard for me to buy an array that small...

What's the cost on that EMC array?

How many commodity servers could I buy for that?

I have a pretty solid idea what state of the art is in the RDBMS world - it's diminishing returns as a machine that's twice as powerful costs 10X as much, all the way up the enterprise ladder. It's spending 100k on your software licenses, 100k on your storage and 500 bucks on a CPU.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's ok. If your domain is highly transactional, it's probably a better move than implementing your own transactions over something else. Just don't pretend that your limitations are actually strengths -- you have your own strengths.

It doesn't matter. You see, in business, there is no "cheap" or "expensive". There's worth the money, or not. It doesn't matter how many commodity servers I could buy for the cost; no matter how cheap they are, the money would be wasted if that simply the wrong technical approach.

Because you can't compete at this level by chucking increasing amounts of anything at the problem - people, dollars, spindles, nodes, you name it.

You see, in business, everything is about cheap or expensive. It's just a more broad definition that includes developer time and ROI.

If your problem is extremely transactional and legitimately unshardable, feel free to drop 6 mil on exadata. Or a half a mil on a database server and backup. But frankly, your objections are starting to have a religious feel to them. All I was saying is that PL/SQL is a pile of crap to code in and fundamentally unscalable without spending a boatload of money. A little better design can get the same thing with a lot less cash.

EDIT: No, those are facts, PL/SQL looks like it was designed in 1965 and, yes, putting all of your CPU processing into a single node is fundamentally unscalable. I've seen it. It was fundamentally unscalable.

I'm not making a religious point about RDBMS - it can be the best model in many situations. I'm making a point about single bottlenecks for your architecture.

"pile of crap" and "fundamentally unscalable" and I'm the religious one o_0

BTW. All architectures have a single bottleneck. Thats pretty much by definition.

Oracle tried to market their Exalogic as "no bottlenecks" which is nearly as funny as "unbreakable linux" and "zero latency".

You buy the EMC unit, because you want the EMC tech to call you and say "we see you have a failing drive, I'm en-route, and I'll be there in 15 minutes with a replacement". Even if you are not paying attention, the unit called in and told the control center it needed attention.

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