Notes on TokuDB and GenieDB
Last week, I edited press releases back-to-back-to-back for three clients, all with announcements at this week’s Percona Live. The ones with embargoes ending today are Tokutek and GenieDB.
Tokutek’s news is that they’re open sourcing much of TokuDB, but holding back hot backup for their paid version. I approve of this strategy — “doesn’t lose data” is an important feature, and well worth paying for.
I kid, I kid. Any system has at least a bad way to do backups — e.g. one that involves slowing performance, or perhaps even requires taking applications offline altogether. So the real points of good backup technology are:
- To keep performance steady.
- To make the whole thing as easy to manage as possible.
GenieDB is announcing a Version 2, which is basically a performance release. So in lieu of pretending to have much article-worthy news, GenieDB is taking the opportunity to remind folks of its core marketing messages, with catchphrases such as “multi-regional self-healing MySQL”. Good choice; indeed, I wish more vendors would adopt that marketing tactic.
Along the way, I did learn a bit more about GenieDB. In particular:
- GenieDB is now just backed by a hacked version of InnoDB (no more Berkeley DB Java Edition).
- Why hacked? Because GenieDB appends a Lamport timestamp to every row, which somehow leads to a need to modify how indexes and caching work.
- Benefits of the chamge include performance and simpler (for the vendor) development.
- An arguable disadvantage of the switch is that GenieDB no longer can use Berkeley DB’s key-value interface — but MySQL now has one of those too.
I also picked up some GenieDB company stats I didn’t know before — 9 employees and 2 paying customers.
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[…] third of my three MySQL-oriented clients I alluded to yesterday is MemSQL. When I wrote about MemSQL last June, the product was an in-memory single-server MySQL […]
I am happy that TokuDB is now open-source. I think the technology can be a big deal for some MySQL users. For me it compressed production data about 2X better than InnoDB compression (2X better means about 4X compression). The write pattern enables longer lifetimes from flash storage devices. I don’t think they had flash in mind many years ago when they started on this, but it is a good fit.
Disclaimer – my brother works there and I am a big fan of Bradley Kuszmaul (founder & chief architect).
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