

DeepDB – High-performing transactional and analytic database - misframer
http://deep.is/

======
buster
So the team consists of ( [http://deep.is/our-invention/](http://deep.is/our-
invention/) ):

    
    
      1 CEO
      1 CTO
      3 Founders
      1 Chairman
      1 VP Product Management
      1 VP Sales
      1 Controller
      1 Director of Engineering
      1 Architect
      1 Consultant
      2 Engineers
    

Yeah... sounds like exactly the company i would never buy from. A company
which basically consistes of 80% "upper management" positions and barely any
"real workers".. Especially when the website is only about marketing claims
and very unspecific details. I can't even find downloads or documenation..

No, i'll stay away.

~~~
pavlov
Those bios are a bit strange. They all manage to fill multiple paragraphs
without actually saying anything relevant about themselves. Instead it's just
strings of empty phrases like "I make magic happen" or "my DNA pushes me to
always seek out the vanguard of technology". (Your DNA, really? Did one of
your ancestors invent fire?)

To read the real bios, you need to click through to the people's LinkedIn
profiles. This reveals that the founders come from companies like Oracle. I
don't know if that explains anything.

~~~
leif
CTO is a professor at UNH, Chief Scientist is from UNH and used to work at
Virtual Iron which was acquired by Oracle, then he worked at Akiban until they
were acquired. It appears some of their patents
([http://www.google.com/patents/US20130290243](http://www.google.com/patents/US20130290243),
[http://www.google.com/patents/US20130254208](http://www.google.com/patents/US20130254208),
[http://www.google.com/patents/US20130226931](http://www.google.com/patents/US20130226931))
were assigned to Cloudtree Inc., which appears to have originally been
something totally different but with what seems to be the same team:
[http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/02/st...](http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/02/stealthy_start-
up_cloudtree_wa.html)

I'm puzzled.

~~~
mattzito
VirtualIron was a huge disaster of a company - they pivoted multiple times
without ever finding market fit, then pissed off potential acquirers with
their attitude, after which they laid everyone off and sold the remains to
Oracle for a pittance ( I remember hearing it was ~$10m).

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/with-virtual-
iron-o...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/with-virtual-iron-oracle-
bought-a-big-loss/)

------
jandrewrogers
Not to be too critical since I like database startups as much as the next guy,
but there is almost nothing original in their approach to database engines.
Most of their assertions about existing databases only apply to relatively
weak open source databases; on the high-end databases don't work the way they
are assuming at all, which makes me wonder how much they actually know about
database engine internals generally. Architecturally, DeepDB goes into the
same bucket as PostgreSQL in terms of capabilities and scalability, albeit a
different design.

As a more technical nitpick, "high availability" does not mean fast restarts.
It means never goes down. The design as described is not a high availability
architecture.

Bonus observation: if you assert your database engines uses extensive fine-
grained locking, don't show a chart with 24 cores at ~100% utilization and
call it "efficient". This is what you would expect to see for a poorly
designed and very _inefficient_ implementation for this type of architecture.
You can be burning all of your CPU and getting very little throughput. A
credible presentation would have demonstrated that system throughput scales
linearly with the number of cores (unlikely given the description of their
internals).

~~~
maxdemarzi
Seems to be targeted as a replacement for InnoDB, slides with actual "meat" on
them =>
[https://portland2013.drupal.org/sites/default/files/slides/B...](https://portland2013.drupal.org/sites/default/files/slides/BlackMesh%20-%20InnoDB%20Replacement%20with%20DeepDB%20for%20MySQL.pptx)

------
taliesinb
At [http://deep.is/deepdb-genesis-of-invention-iii/](http://deep.is/deepdb-
genesis-of-invention-iii/), the chief scientist of this company credits the
following four "axioms" for his "General Theory of Information":

Axiom 1: Information is a sequence of Information (self-similar) that is
segmented by consistent (well-formed) order.

Axiom 2: Segmented Information is addressable by the First where a sequence of
Firsts is a Segment of Summarization.

Axiom 3: Information of a Segment is equal distance to the sequence of
Information between non-associated Summarizations.

Axiom 4: Sequenced Information is in direction relation to former and later
Information of which Patterns can be Matched.

I don't know what any of that means. Worse, it sounds to me like "cargo-cult"
computer science.

~~~
mercurial
I also don't know what any of it means, but it certainly looks impressive with
all these uppercase letters.

------
en4bz
> A NEW GENERAL PURPOSE DATABASE DESIGNED FOR BIG DATA AND THE CLOUD THAT
> PERFORMS SIMULTANEOUS TRANSACTIONS AND ANALYTICS … IN REAL-TIME, ON THE SAME
> DATA SET

Well they certainly have all the right buzzwords present in their pitch. Other
than that there's very little to go on right now as to how much merit their
product deserves.

~~~
ansimionescu
See @buster's comment. 100 "managers" and 2 engineers, what can go wrong?

------
gregwebs
It amazes me that HN users would spend time commenting here before taking a
few seconds to navigate a website. Here is an overview of technical
information: [http://deep.is/knowledge/deepdb-white-
paper/](http://deep.is/knowledge/deepdb-white-paper/)

These are the interesting things that sticks out to me:

The understanding that storage system throughput is maximized by using
sequential access patterns led to the creation of streaming, append-only
transactional and indexing algorithms. Our approach is unique in that all
database files (i.e. transactional state, indexes, and metadata) are streamed,
append-only files.

...

The CASI Tree breaks from a traditional b-tree on-disk approach, eliminating
update in-place operations on fixed size pages. Instead, the CASI Tree is an
append-only Purely Functional Tree data structure.

...

A complete database audit trail is maintained when running in archival mode,
making all previous database states available. These states may be queried in
read-only mode, efficiently supporting read-only analytics of point-in-time
transactional database states

~~~
leif
This links to the wrong fractal tree paper for discussing write-read optimized
data structures. The proper one is
[http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/sbtree.pdf](http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/sbtree.pdf)

This makes me wonder how much research this team really did. I'm not ready to
claim they haven't done it, but it raises the question. I would like to see
the actual data structure published somewhere.

------
primitivesuave
Experience has taught me to be naturally skeptical when a startup says they
designed a database from the ground up. It seems like they put every buzzword
of machine learning and database design into their website, and the staff
seems to be primarily management people and only a handful of engineering
staff.

But who knows, maybe in 5 years we'll be doing our business analytics with
DeepDB, but most likely we'll be doing business analytics with a tool that
doesn't seem this sketchy.

------
snorkel
No download. No trial. No install doc. No example doc. No tutorial. Just lots
and lots of assertions of greatness. That's not so deep.

------
nebulous1
Wow, a database actually designed for both big data and the cloud! Sounds like
deep science to me!

------
mtravis
I am having trouble locating any reports to reproducible benchmarks that back
up their performance claims.

------
EdwardDiego
A lot of buzzwords, but little actual information. How fast is it? Is it
equally fast for both OLTP and OLAP style work?

It seems to be optimising to remove the ETL step of transactional - analytical
data migration, but you still need the analytical speed.

