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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering about it, don't bother searching for 'NewSQL'. It's a buzzword that doesn't actually mean anything other than 'it's not mysql, pgsql, oracle, or mssql.' They claim to improve on the standard DBs, but every single DB does it in a different way. The name is useless.

Instead, read the 'who we are' and 'how it works' bits on NuoDB's page. They were much more informative.

I think it sounds exciting and fresh... And doesn't seem to be open source at all.

I'm not allergic to paying money for software, but I've found I'm happiest when using something that I can guarantee will survive, even if may have to do so by my own hand. Commercial products have a tendency to be a pain in the rear.

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Thanks for the heads up (was looking for more real info and not the damnable 'beta signup' form)

This sounds like SQL ontop of Cassandra (for a more or less mental-map if you are looking for one):

  Our distributed non-blocking atomic commit protocol allows database 
  transaction processing at any available node. The system is 
  designed to provide a consistent view of data, high availability, 
  and the ability to detect and manage partitions in a predictable   
  and consistent manner. Query processing scales with the number of 
  available nodes, storage scales according to the choice of storage 
  manager of which there are many. Storage managers are key/value 
  storage engines that also operate as a distributed in-memory cache 
  and participate in the commit protocol to ensure durability 
  guarantees.

Given that they seem to favor consistency in the CAP model, it would be closer to Hbase in this regard. Cassandra is, by design, eventually consistent and can not offer these same guarantees.

Thanks for the correction -- am still fuzzy on the details of Cassandra compared to HBase.

This is false. Cassandra can offer any level of consistency you desire, on a per-operation basis. See the "ConsistencyLevel" section of http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/API. The tradeoffs of the CAP theorem, of course, apply. But if you want 100% consistency (availability and partition-tolerance be damned) it's there for you.

There is a general misconception that the an entire DBMS must pick tradeoffs based on the CAP theorem. (IE, you can use a database that offers availability, but can NEVER offer immediate consistency) Instead, a DBMS may offer different CAP guarantees per operation.

I don't think so. Does Cassandra provide guarantees regarding the ordering of queries? Cause I couldn't see that.

Another problem I can see is when you write to 3 nodes, have W=2 and a write succeeds only one one node. Then later on through read repair the value propagates to the other 2 nodes. So our write "failed" but really in the end succeeded. I'm not too much into the Cassandra details but those two things immediately came to my mind when reading some of the wiki pages.

It boils down to not using/offering algorithms like 2-Phase Commit or Paxos but more sloppy quorums.

So from what I can tell, Cassandra can not guarantee strong consistency. But then again I could be wrong and missed something.

Taken directly from the page I linked from above:

"Note that if W + R > ReplicationFactor, where W is the number of nodes to block for on write, and R the number to block for on reads, you will have strongly consistent behavior; that is, readers will always see the most recent write."

Could you explain why this is incorrect? It seems the Cassandra devs use the definition of "consistency" from Brewer's paper, and Cassandra offers this level of consistency.

Your point about read-repair is correct when using QUORUM consistency level, but even then you can avoid that by using the ALL consistency level.

QUORUM reads & writes in Cassandra are still stronger than guarantees given by async master/slave systems like MySQL, MongoDB, HBase, or Redis.

All the NewSQLs I've seen are shared-nothing cluster databases; that's basically the definition of the term. (Of course, that technology was invented in the 1980s and then forgotten, so it's new to somebody.)

As for open source, something you can't say is that open source communities are unable to develop this kind of software.

Given that the CEO worked with the author of the 1986 paper about shared-nothing clusters, you're probably right.

"NewSQL" basically means "old guy desperately trying to stay relevant in a post-relational world" See also: VoltDB.

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