ScaleBase, another MPP OLTP quasi-DBMS
Liran Zelkha of ScaleBase raised his hand on Twitter. It turns out ScaleBase has a story rather similar to that of CodeFutures/dbShards. That is:
- Like dbShards, ScaleBase is a proxy that looks to the application like a scale-out DBMS, but routes work to multiple servers running MySQL against different shards of the database. Other DBMS beyond MySQL are planned, but PostgreSQL — which dbShards supports — did not get mentioned.
- Sharding is done at configuration time, and is transparent to the application. You want to shard the big tables and replicate the small ones, because if you join two sharded tables, performance can be slow. ScaleBase may have more of a configuration-advisor wizard than dbShards does.
- Each shard is replicated to a mirror, in a high-availability way.
- You can use ScaleBase across multiple data centers, but there’s little or no magic to overcome the performance issues that would arise in many use cases.
- Much like dbShards, ScaleBase supports three kinds of sharding — hash, list, and range.
- ScaleBase currently has no support whatsoever for stored procedures, which is slightly less than dbShards has.
- Liran stresses that ScaleBase looks even to management tools — e.g. TOAD — like a single DBMS.
- ScaleBase runs on EC2 and private cloud.
Our talk didn’t get deeply technical, and I don’t know exactly how ScaleBase’s replication works. But a website reference to a small transaction log in a distributed cache does sound, while not identical to the dbShards approach, at least directionally similar.
ScaleBase is a year or so old, with about 6 people, based in the Boston area despite strong Israeli roots. ScaleBase has raised a round of venture capital; I didn’t ask for details.
Liran says that ScaleBase is in closed beta, with some production users, at least one of whom has over 100 database servers.
Comments
10 Responses to “ScaleBase, another MPP OLTP quasi-DBMS”
Leave a Reply
If you want invites for the beta just drop me a mail at liran.zelkha@scalebase.com
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Database_News and liran_zelkha, ScaleBase. ScaleBase said: ScaleBase gets a blog post on Curt Monash http://bit.ly/f9rk4o […]
There are some good things about a proxy, but it does add extra servers and some overhead.
Just to clarify, dbShards does not use a proxy, instead the technology relies on an intelligent client that is plug-compatible with vendor drivers (C and JDBC are supported). This means that there is no middle tier between the app and the database, its a direct connection. The driver simply makes the sharding decisions and delegates to the native driver for communications.
That’s true. However – the entire eco-system of the database – BI, etc. can not work with a driver – only with a proxy.
Plug-compatible drivers are both efficient and work seamlessly with BI and other tools — they have an identical API that matches the vendor drivers. The drivers do have to be installed of course, but that is the case with any database product.
[…] and ScaleBase feature transparent sharding (this is the case which inspired me to introduce the […]
[…] his list and mine, the high-performance/scale-out MySQL alternatives look like dbShards, Schooner, ScaleBase, ScaleDB, Tokutek, Akiban, Xeround, and Clustrix. The first two are to my knowledge more proven […]
[…] ScaleBase Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]
[…] in the past include Akiban, Tokutek, CodeFutures (dbShards), Clustrix, Schooner (Membrain), VoltDB, ScaleBase, and ScaleDB, with GenieDB and NuoDB coming […]
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I really appreciate your
efforts and I will be waiting for your next post thank you once
again.