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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

> We're on 5.5 and couldn't do some table operations that seemed promising without service disruptions.

Everyone has this problem. But it's been largely solved in practice by performing the schema changes on slaves, and then promoting the slaves to master.

Also, if you're just using RethinkDB as a delayed (and almost certainly inconsistent) secondary storage system, why not use ElasticSearch instead?

BTW, 250GB fits in memory on any decent size box. You're not really going to see how things scale till you get into the terabytes.

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I don't think 250GB will fit in memory on any reasonable sized box. What world do you live in?

An r720 from dell or similar model from dell with 600GB*2 SSD intel s3500DC model, 20 cores & 256GB of RAM will go for 5k-7k. You can bump this to 386GB of ram without going above 10k.

And up to 768GB if you go with 32GB LRDIMMs for about $14k (intel oem chassis).

When I changed the country to Japan, the sticker price jumped from 2000 USD to 15,000 USD eq. for a very basic system. I am just at a loss as to what can explain this disparity. Guess I will have to call up my vendor to get a comparable quote.

My tip is always to try to get in contact with a couple of reseller and play them out against each other in the price department.

If you are looking for larger purchases 50k+ USD than you should talk directly with Dell, HP or comparable vendor and put them into the play off for who you choose :)

I always do that. I have worked with Strategic Sourcing for a while...so... ;-)

A world where people use real servers.

All of our physical boxes have 256gb+ of RAM.

They run VM's via XenServer for most of our uses, but our production DB's run on bare metal as they need the RAM and disk performance.

re: Elasticsearch

Rethink's 'ungroup' method lets you chain multiple reductions, which is incredibly powerful for building aggregation queries. Elasticsearch doesn't have that capability, and hence its aggregation capabilities are severely limited.

For example, with Rethink, it's very easy to compute a metric from metrics computed in a previous reduction. You can't do that with Elasticsearch, since its dsl allows metrics to only be computed from fields in the raw document, but not from other aggregation metrics.

splunk has eventstats command which computes metrics and assigns them to fields of documents so you can process them. is that something similar? (except the fact that splunk's invoices are know to cause cardiac arrest?)

besides the price, it's an extra moving part in the system. Also, can it add the fields to the aggregated result or just the raw documents?

splunk can do both: stats aggregates, eventstats adds aggregate fields to raw documents.

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