FoundationDB — Not Your Standard NoSQL Database | Hacker News Reader

FoundationDB — Not Your Standard NoSQL Database

techcrunch.com

18 pointsfirefox17 comments

I see a lot of snarky comments (maybe that has to do with the journalism of the article), but my recollection of FoundationDB is that it is interesting. It's trying to tackle the problem of enabling ACID, while also not being SQL-dialect oriented, putting it in a somewhat unique part of the overall landscape.

So, if you are put off by TechCrunch's journalism, I don't know of a great reason to let that spill over into one's gut assessment FoundationDB. Here is a link to previous discussion, where many people try to poke holes into the tradeoffs being made for FoundationDB: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719

Perhaps the company needs to work to reign in some of the language, it seems like the last discussion revolved around some aspects of the system that tripped a lot of skepticism-detectors (or at least "glaring caveat-omission" detectors) last time also.

FoundationDB founder here. Thanks for this comment. It's pretty hard to talk about this detailed technical stuff in the chaos of a conference. The discussion you link to and our web page both have a bunch of information that I think is high signal/noise for people interested in the tech details.

If anyone is at Disrupt, please come by and see our live demo of a portable cluster of the database dealing with power and network failures. Of course, we'll try our best to answer questions here too.

If I had any feedback, it might be to produce a frank document of trade-offs in your system: workloads that work very well, pathological workloads that perform poorly or lead to some awkward code, given the mechanisms at play. I'm sure you have chosen your trade-offs carefully, or else you wouldn't have bothered doing the hard work to commercialize them. Here you may want to assess the advantages of other general approaches (I think specific implementations would be too much detail and invite a quagmire of nit-picking) versus your own, but the problems they also create that you do not have.

It's something I'm going to try to do anyway, but it would make me feel as though I have a more constructive relationship with the company rather than trying to guess what mix of design decisions you fall in, probably all of which have at least been implemented at least once independently before in some system or another -- however, your mix is likely novel.

However, I don't see this done very often in proprietary offerings (that's still the case for FoundationDB, right?), and I'm not sure if that's because such frankness is a stupid idea or if because everyone is just doing what everyone around them does. It is something that more collaborative open source projects do more freely.

Different FoundationDB founder here :)

We'd be happy to give you information that would be helpful for your document - your offer to put something like that together is generous, helpful, and we'll definitely take you up on it.

Why don't you shoot me an email at nick dot lavezzo at foundationdb. If you're at Disrupt or in the SF area we might even be able to get together before we head back to DC on Thursday morning.

Thanks again for the helpful comments and interest!

I am speaking more generally -- I'm not evaluating a new database for my toolchain at the moment, and to be honest, I am very shy of anything that is proprietary-only. However, I thought your ideas were interesting regardless, so I felt compelled to defend their interesting-ness.

I'm just tired of trying pierce through proprietary database literature language to sort a new database system that has Apparently Magical Properties into the multi-dimensional bin of tradeoffs. Consider the FAQ for Redis: http://redis.io/topics/faq

Or, the very short rundown in the second half of the home page of Postgres-XC http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/, although it probably could use some fine-tuning. Many of the developers, including the first one, are not native english speakers.

A good example in proprietary-land is Datomic: http://www.datomic.com/faq.html. Here's a good paragraph:

    How does Datomic handle consistency, availability and scale?  Because
    Datomic separates the handling of transaction processing and
    query/read, it can make independent choices for each
    facility. Transactions favor consistency over availability, and the
    loss of a transactor will require traditional failover
    approaches. Queries and reads, however, are serviced by the highly
    available, replicated and scalable infrastructure of DynamoDB. And,
    since the data segments stored by Datomic in Dynamo are immutable,
    they are always consistent. Thus, Datomic is well suited for
    applications that require write consistency and read scalability.

On the other hand, I really appreciate your benchmarks to give me a ballpark idea, and think it's great that you offer them up so easily. They could probably take a less pronounced position in your literature if you find you are in need of space for other material, though.

I see what you mean - thanks for the clarification. We'll be working on a FAQ to get up on the website soon, and we'll also be putting up a blog where we'll cover areas of particular interest in detail. I'm sure CAP will be one of the earliest topics covered, but we've made a lot of important design decisions while building this product and they should all make for interesting reading.

We've done our best to take the technical high road in those hard decisions - generally trading in ease of (our) development for stronger guarantees, more rigorous testing, and higher performance. We're excited to talk about our development process and decisions with the world. Looks like we've got some writing to do :)

It appears that they don't actually understand what the problem is, and are solving it by introducing a situation where the database will just stop working in the face of a partition. Maybe that's not right, but they need to stop hand waving.

A much better solution is being worked on by a Mr. Hellerstein who will be speaking at the upcoming Ricon: http://basho.com/community/ricon2012/

Hi - FoundationDB founder here. I'll point you to a comment thread from a previous HN discussion where my co-founder Dave Scherer addressed how we deal with partitions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295770

Please let us know if you have any questions this doesn't answer and we'd be happy to answer. Also, if you'd like to actually SEE us deal with a data partition, we can show you that live at Disrupt with the demo cluster we've built :)

"The service can scale across a distributed infrastructure without the worry of a single point of failure, making it simpler to scale."

    FoundationDB can scale once across a distributed 
    infrastructure. That’s opposed to SQL database 
    technology has to be installed on individual servers.

Can anyone explain?

A FoundationDB database can scale "horizontally" by adding multiple machines to a cluster, and you can scale the cluster up by adding more machines. This is opposed to standard SQL databases which provide one or more databases per server, but never one database from multiple servers.

That statement has really no foundation and maybe the founders of FoundationDB should read a introduction to distributed database book, for example "Principles of Distributed Database Systems" by Özsu and Valduriez.

The result, they say, is an infinitely scalable database that goes beyond what most NoSQL databases offer.

No wonder NoSQL gets so much flake.

I've got a car that runs on water. No, really. The thing is, these other cars, they just decide to run on gas. Totally ignoring the potential of water power. Of course this design is really fundamental to the way cars will be built in the future, you could call it a foundation of a new paradigm for cars-- all the performance of a gas car, without all the hassle and expense- not to mention pollution-- of gasoline. Just simple pure water.

Don't believe me? You shouldn't. The question is, how can we take TechCrunch seriously when they do not even ask the basic questions?

Edit: Seriously, they say its distributed but ACID compiant. Ok, how do you do that? This violates the CAP theorem. How do they handle partitions? Without answering this, the article is as meaningless as an announcement of a water powered car.

I think you should take a quick look at oracle's exadata machines. Mostly because they are both distributed and ACID compliant.

There are standard NoSQL databases?

quite possibly, dbm: no sql at all, and has been around for 40 years.

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