Making an HTAP Database a Reality: What I Learned from PingCAP's VLDB Paper | Hacker News Reader

Making an HTAP Database a Reality: What I Learned from PingCAP's VLDB Paper

pingcap.com

9 pointsCaitin_Chen4 comments

>This is the first paper in the industry to describe the implementation of a distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database.

Oracle's In-Memory option offers dual Row and Columnar storage for Hybrid Transactional/Analytical workloads. The paper describing the feature was published to VLDB in 2015 : https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/2824032.2824061

Pingcap gets on HN front page at regular intervals. I want to believe TiDB is a good product but the sleazy marketing campaigns leave me questioning.

They're always "the first", "the best" or "the fastest". So I tried TiDB on our real life workload and it was 5x slower than a single MySQL instance when running 3 shards. This doesn't jive with any of the blog posts they release.

I really think they're running a marketing racket with a bunch of sockpuppets on various social media platforms. Such speculation on here usually summons Dang but I don't see how they can otherwise get to front page of HN and other coder forums so regularly. It doesn't make sense.

Having "a paper" that's high impact but somewhat plagiarized fits their MO to me. I'm an admitted conspiracy theorist and I am ever sceptical of their claims

Disclaimer: PingCAPer here. Thanks for your attention to PingCAP and TiDB. It’s true that we are on HN front page for many times - that’s incredible recognition for the value of our technical content, and we are humbled and thankful. We take great pride in our work, and have always committed to valuable, accurate and insightful content.

As for referring our PVLDB as “the first industry paper”, thanks @karsinkk for pointing out. We admit that the original description was inaccurate and just updated it to be “This is the first paper in the industry to describe the Raft-based implementation of a distributed Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database.”

However, we have never claimed ourselves as “the best, the fastest.” If you find such occurrences and think they are inaccurate, please do share with us and we will correct the same ASAP. As pointed in https://pingcap.com/blog/9-why's-to-ask-when-evaluating-a-di..., “There's no single technology that can be the elixir to all your problems. The database realm is no different. If your data can fit on a single MySQL instance without too much pressure on your server, or if your performance requirement for complex queries isn't high, then a distributed database may not be a good choice. Choosing to use a distributed database typically means additional maintenance cost, which may not be worthwhile for small workloads. “

Regarding your comparison between TiDB and MySQL, there are differences between MySQL and TiDB as stated here: https://opensource.com/article/18/11/key-differences-between.... If you are still interested in trying out TiDB with your real life workload, we are very happy to help you. Please reach out to us in our community Slack: https://slack.tidb.io/invite?team=tidb-community&channel=eve...

I may have had an axe to grind when TiDB didn't fit our workload so I apologize for being over the top there. You have good marketing, but I'm wary of companies like yours that maintain such a pervasive social media influence. It's a fine line between creative marketing and deception on social media where identities are nebulous things.

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