Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the "About and Goals" section of their docs http://www.infinisql.org/docs/overview/#idp37033600

I can't seem to find the word "Reliable" or any variation thereof anywhere in there.

In fact, that word is no where to be found on the blog post or on the entire InfiniSQL page (not in the Overview, Guides, Reference or even FAQ). I find this quite remarkable since reliability is the true virtue of an RDBMS, not speed or even capacity. At least that's what PostgreSQL aims for and this being another RDBMS, and is also open source, I see it as InfiniSQL's only direct competitor.

It's nice that this is scalable, apparently, to ridiculous levels, but if I can't retrieve what I store in exactly the same shape as I stored it, then that's a bit of a buzz kill for me.

Can we have some assurance that this is the case?

There's a note on "Durability" and a shot at log file writing for transactions, and presumably InfiniSQL uses concurrency and replicas, to provide it. In the Data Storage section, it mentions that InfiniSQL is still an in-memory database for the most part http://www.infinisql.org/docs/overview/#idp37053600

What they're describing is a massively redundant, UPS backed, in-memory cache.

Am I wrong?

Hi, eksmith. I talk a bit about plans for durability in that overview document.

I promise that I have every intention of making InfiniSQL a platform that does not lose data. I have a long career working in environments that demand 100% data integrity. If I de-emphasized it, it was not intentional.

PostgreSQL doesn't scale for OLTP workloads past a single node. There are a handful of products similar to InfiniSQL (google for the term NewSQL for a survey of them).

And yes, a redundant UPS-backed in-memory cache. I have some ideas on how to do regular disk backing as well (which I'm sure you've read).

And if a more traditional log-based storage layer is added, InfiniSQL will still scale nearly linearly across nodes horizontally. Multi-node scale and in-memory are not dependent on one another. Though I believe that redundant UPS systems managed by a quorum of administrative agents, and provide durability just like writing to disk.

Are you familiar with high end storage arrays, such as from HDS or EMC? They write to redundant memory, battery backed and managed by logic in the arrays. I'm just moving that type of design to protect the database application itself, up from the block layer.

And some people trust their datacenter power--they use pure in-memory databases without UPS already, or they do things like asynchronously write transaction log, which also sacrifices durability. For those groups, InfiniSQL ought to be just fine, without UPS systems.

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