
TokuDB open sourced - porker
http://www.tokutek.com/2013/04/announcing-tokudb-v7-open-source-and-more/
======
continuations
I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago
the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a
lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and
Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions.

But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back
then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now
these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-
optimized databases.

If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have
turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase
in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a
much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really
gained much traction.

~~~
zardosht
One big differentiating feature between TokuDB and other write optimized
databases is that TokuDB is fully transactional, it is ACID compliant. There
is a demand for this.

AFAIK, TokuDB is the only write-optimized transactional data store. We (I work
at Tokutek) are working on integrating with MongoDB as we speak, and when we
do, we will bring transactional semantics to MongoDB in addition to improved
performance.

So, I think there is still a big demand out there that TokuDB will be able to
meet

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plasma
Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing-
tokudb-v7-open-source-and-
more%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing-
tokudb-v7-open-source-and-
more%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57.2161j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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brass9
> Tokutek, a leader in high-performance and agile database storage engines....

"Database Error: Error establishing a database connection"

Ouch!

~~~
muyuu
Heh

<http://i.imgur.com/2WhDwFI.png>

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mrjbq7
TokuDB is great technology, glad to see them embracing open source. Too bad
their wordpress installation needs some tuning!

~~~
ritonlajoie
The site is down. What is great in this technology ?

~~~
mjn
The main technical underpinning (though note this isn't my area) seems to be
basing indices on a particular improvement to B-trees, Cache-Oblivious
Streaming B-Trees, which have some nice performance characteristics. I _think_
what TokuDB calls "fractal trees" are just a catchier synonym.

Here's an academic paper from a few years ago from some of the people
involved: <http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/sbtree.pdf>

And a more recent talk focused on TokuDB:
[http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Presentatio...](http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Presentation.pdf)

~~~
leif
We have some more descriptions of Fractal Tree Indexes at
<http://tokutek.com/what-is-a-fractal-tree>, and I'm always happy to answer
questions about it.

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bsg75
"Error establishing a database connection" - Irony.

~~~
tachion
Shit happens - to everyone, even DB guys. Even with DB's. And I'd say more
often with DB's to DB guys than with DB's to anyone else ;)

------
bradleykuszmaul
Sadly, we don't use TokuDB to run our web site. It's some relatively
inexpensive service.

------
leif
We're trying to contact the website folk but they're mighty busy announcing
things right now. I'll let you all know what happened soon. In the meantime,
here's a press release you can read: [http://www.marketwire.com/press-
release/tokutek-meets-big-da...](http://www.marketwire.com/press-
release/tokutek-meets-big-data-demand-with-open-source-tokudb-1781248.htm)

Also, we're on github: <http://github.com/Tokutek> and on IRC at #tokutek on
irc.freenode.net, so come hang out!

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carterschonwald
Does this mean that it's now safe for folks to write their own versions of the
data structures that tokutek has patents on? They hold patents on some of the
more natural choices In cache oblivious b trees (admittedly they also invented
those retrospectively natural choices).

~~~
andrewljohnson
Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the
difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just
notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate
inventors.

I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and
what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every
corporation on their website actually.

~~~
reinhardt
"A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a
data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and
can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors."

Can we please let this disingenuous argument die already? Yes, in theory they
can spring up in many minds independently. In practice they rarely do unless
they are trivial. If the alleged disparate inventors can prove they came up
with it independently, fine; the onus is on them.

~~~
andrewljohnson
In practice, independent invention happens all the time, and we end up with
absurd patent lawsuits as a result.

~~~
reinhardt
AFAIK none of these ludicrous patents are about data structures, algorithms or
math formulas.

~~~
Kalium
I find that somewhat difficult to accept, given that pretty much every single
patent that touches software is ludicrous.

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zardosht
Link to source code: <https://github.com/tokutek>

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txsl
Was quite looking forward to reading this, but when I clicked the link, I was
faced with: <http://imgur.com/wwEogpx> I think there's a certain irony seeing
as this is a database related announcement!

~~~
jemfinch
You took a screenshot of plain text. Did "Error establishing database
connection" not suffice?

~~~
mjs
Well ... I think it's actually pretty good bug reporting habit. Was it
text/plain or unstyled text/html? Was the body an error message but a styled
header and footer present? You might want to copy and paste the text as well,
to aid future copy and paste efforts, but it's surprisingly frequently useful
to have a screenshot.

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schleppy_oc
LOL "Error establishing a database connection"

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trs80coco
OK, we are all learning first hand here about the "slashdot" effect
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect> (now Hacker news effect).

We are working to get the site back up (a simple Wordpress site set up by the
marketing department that does not use our database). In the meantime, please
take a look at <http://mwne.ws/124r2GL>

Thanks for all the comments. We clearly didn't anticipate this level of
excitement, but are grateful for the interest.

------
zardosht
And our google groups: \- tokudb-dev \- tokudb-user

------
Tokutek
Ok, the website is starting to come back online after our huge spike in
traffic.

Thanks for all the interest and for your patience...

-Tokutek

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misframer
Anyone have a cached page?

~~~
jheino
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=fi&q=ca...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=fi&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokutek.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fannouncing-
tokudb-v7-open-source-and-more%2F)

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acjohnson55
Any plans to have this as an indexing option for PostgreSQL?

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ShiningRay
Is there any testimonial using TokuDB?

~~~
zardosht
Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: <http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/>

~~~
btb
Edit, oops followed parents link to this:
<http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/>:

"Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while
database is running."

\- Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to
take a backup of a running database?

~~~
leif
Someone using the open source version can take backups just as they would with
our versions prior to 7.0:

\- snapshots (LVM, EBS, etc...)

\- cold backups

\- mysqldump (with MVCC, this is technically hot)

