

Y Combinator’s FathomDB Takes The Hassle Out Of Managing Your Database - jmorin007
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/27/y-combinators-fathomdb-takes-the-hassle-out-of-managing-your-database/

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gaius
_the system isn’t necessarily meant to actually replace database
administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can
focus on more complex and important issues_

Nice quote. The last company I worked for developed trading software for
foreign exchange and money markets. Only you couldn't ever sell it to traders;
they were too afraid of being put out of a job. You had to go to the Head of
Desk and sell him on the benefits.

As it turns out few of them actually were put out of work, many really were
able to move up into trading more volume and higher-value instruments. But if
you say that up front, no-one will believe you.

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mixmax
I would say that there's am essential piece of information that's not answered
in your FAQ: What happens to my data if you go out of business?

That is a dealbreaker for me. If you go out of business (which I hope you
don't) I need to get my data out, or I'll be out of business too.

With that said, I've signed up for your service, and hope to use it. It's a
great idea.

~~~
justinsb
Understand the concern. We'll have options to dump a backup to various
destinations under your control. Your S3 account would be a good choice within
EC2 (no bandwidth charges), but we could also do FTP.

~~~
mixmax
Great, that would definitely make me sleep better at night. Particularly if it
could be automated so that I would have a dump delivered every night.

And good luck with it :-)

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thorax
I'd be a lot happier if I saw hints that FathomDB would also handle
slave/mastering situations as well. Ideally it would be really easy to set
those up, add new slaves, etc. I didn't see anything on this in the FAQ-- nor
a clarification on the backups. Are the backups daily, are they EBS snapshots,
etc?

Right now, the only thing that looked overly compelling (versus our existing
RightScale/free+MySQL tools) was some of the performance analysis reports, but
we get hints at that via other mechanisms.

Promising, especially if it grows. I'm hopeful because we use so much EC2 and
this could help us speed things up if it adds more features.

~~~
moe
Well they're just starting out and I guess that's where the obvious potential
is.

The screencast didn't get me so excited either. Mostly because of the guy
raving off in that annoying marketing slang over the most basic features,
without answering any of the interesting questions.

For example he praises the ability to make queries from the web frontend and
the visualization of the mysql logfiles as "enterprise features" - Oh c'mon
boy.

More interesting would have been to learn more about that magic "server size"
slider that goes from 1-256. Will that select the amazon instance type, mysql
configuration, EBS size, or what does it do?

From what I can see they built a pretty frontend that lets you launch
customized AMI images with a mysql installation. I sure hope there's more
about it because this alone would take little more than 4 weeks to clone...

(We built a similar frontend for our own EC2 postgres cluster, so this is a
bit more than an educated guess).

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bryanwoods
This is a really great idea. I'm excited to try it out. Congratulations!

~~~
goodgoblin
I agree completely - what a great idea! - I will definitely give these guys a
try. Rightscale is in the same space, but they charge an arm and a leg.

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dw0rm
I'd think running sql queries over the internet would slow down response time.
Or is it not significant?

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justinsb
We're starting by targeting EC2 customers and ourselves running within EC2 to
avoid this issue.

In future, we'll work with more cloud/hosting providers so that we can stay
'close' to the client, and we do have some tech that could be applied here
also.

~~~
dw0rm
Is it possible to apply the service to already existing clients databases,
maybe by sshing to their servers or providing them with special software?

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Andys
You could just dump your current DB and restore it to the new one hosted at
EC2, then point your application to the new one.

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lecha
Congrats on release.

People interested in FantomDB should also consider RightScale who also offers
managing and scaling MySQL on EC2 -
[http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/08/20/redundant-mysql-set-
up...](http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/08/20/redundant-mysql-set-up-for-
amazon-ec2/)

RightScale doesn't offer MySQL-specific services such as reporting etc. but
can help with treating your entire application stack "as a service"

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amirnathoo
Don't do a magnolia,

Never hire a DBA,

Effortless, reliable backup,

Get FathomDB today

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oldgregg
Nice and simple.

Question: Is it theoretically possible to build a cloud hash-database that
uses mysql on the front-end? Any joins would automatically be handled for you
and the system would watch what queries you are running to dynamically
balance/distribute/reindex data as needed. SimpleDB/Couch/etc work, but they
require a steep learning curve for people used to working with relational
databases.

At the end of the day you are just saving/getting data, I don't understand why
the database service can't deal with the pain.

~~~
justinsb
I think it's definitely possible to front-end a cloud database with MySQL, but
the question is: would it be faster or better in some other way? Relational
databases are very functional, reasonably efficient and powerful, and give you
some nice guarantees (ACID).

The 'alternative' databases trade off some of those properties for
scalability; reintroduce them with a layer on top and I'd guess you'd lose
those benefits.

~~~
dasil003
I would go further than just saying "reasonably efficient and powerful". More
like "extremely powerful and optimized".

No offense to the grandparent, but that comment strikes me as a direct result
of the hype around these key-value store DBs. The idea that you could build
out a relational database using a key-value store as the backend and the end
result would somehow have the underlying system's scalability properties needs
to be shot down with extreme prejudice.

The philosophy behind a key-value store DB is that, if we don't need 99% of
the powerful features and ad-hoc queries of a relational database, we can
build something that scales much better. There is some (growing) subset of
relational functionality that can easily be implemented on top of a key-value
store, but the developer better know what that is.

Emulating a full-on relational database is not going to perform at anywhere
near the level of a real relational database. You'd be better off working on
the problem of better ways of replicating and sharding regular relational
databases rather than conflating two different models with competing
assumptions.

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modoc
Congrats on the launch and good press! I wish you the best of luck. There is
probably a decent number of people who would like to avoid dealing with the
database infrastructure directly.

However, this launch raises a question for me, with regards to funding and
YCombinator.

Obviously I'm only seeing what's in the video, but it looks like you have a
provisioning system, and a web interface (like an enhanced phpMyAdmin). I
assume there's backups, failover, monitoring, etc... in the background as
well.

Why did you need funding for this? What did you gain from YCombinator? Perhaps
I'm downplaying your efforts due to ignorance on how your system really works,
but it seems pretty straightforward to build. I don't use EC2, but I'm pretty
sure I could build a web app that creates new databases, an enhanced version
of phpMyAdmin, and my standard monitoring/backup stuff that I do already, in a
couple of days. My understanding is the "cloud" aspect of EC2 makes scaling
the new db instances out much easier (than if I did it myself using dedicated
servers). So I'm not sure why you felt you needed investors, months of
dedicated full time work, exposure to VCs, etc...?

My intent isn't to be snarky or put down your accomplishments, but clearly I'm
missing either the complexity and effort to build your solution, or I'm
missing some key ingredient that YC provided that made your startup
easier/possible/etc...

~~~
justinsb
If you really could have built it in a few days, you should come work for
FathomDB!

I would point out that doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude
harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be
that things will fail and you have to build accordingly.

The simplicity of the web-based GUI and the offering hides the complexity
going on under the surface. But that's the whole point of FathomDB: you just
use the database, and you don't see (or care about) the hoops we're jumping
through to make it all work.

~~~
timf
" _doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on
dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and
you have to build accordingly_ "

I don't follow, how is that different from dedicated hardware where you also
have to assume failure will happen?

If anything I'd argue it's the opposite (but ultimately note that I think both
take some work). But I say that it's perhaps the opposite because on EC2, you
have EBS:

" _volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most
recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between
0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This
compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of
around 4%_ "

And neither failure rate involves RAID which you can of course do with both
EBS (mdadm) and disks to go for lower AFR projections.

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vaksel
how much did it cost you to sponsor that roundtable thing?

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justinsb
I don't think I should say, but I would say that the TechCrunch team were
fantastic, put together an amazing event, and helped FathomDB get great launch
exposure. I would definitely do it again, and would recommend it to others
where the event's theme is relevant to your business, as 'cloud' is to
FathomDB.

~~~
vaksel
understandable...how about letting us know how you went about getting in touch
with techcrunch, did pg phone Arrington? called yourself? emailed?

~~~
justinsb
Sorry to disappoint: there is no great tale of working back channels, I just
emailed them on the address they provided in the conference info.

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motoko
Are there plans for adding PostgreSQL?

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snewe
Is there a benefit to using EC/2 for mysql if the majority of the work is
reads rather than writes (Something like 90/10)? A large site I work (non-
profit) could move all our mysql DBs to EC/2 with something like FathomDB, but
I worry that it will be more expensive (and not that better performance-wise)
than our current dedicated server at Rackspace.

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fuzzmeister
Could anyone comment on the feasibility and speed of using this service as a
database for a non-EC2 dedicated box?

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modoc
That will depend greatly on how you use your database (number of queries over
time, type of queries, size of returned data, etc...).

I worked on a large DB intensive eCommerce site, with a large number of writes
and un-cachable data. While it worked great locally, trying to point a cluster
at the DB in the backup data center (50 ms away on a dedicated backbone line)
absolutely killed performance.

Also, for another eCommerce site, the local dev instance on my laptop boots in
about ~ 1 minute when running against a local database. It takes about ~10
minutes when running against the corporate dev db over the VPN connection
(~50ms added latency).

However, for an application with more cacheable data, and less queries per
second, it would matter less.

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plusbryan
Nice! if you can take the guesswork out of backups and slaves, you'll save me
(and a lot of others) a ton of work!

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tonystubblebine
Is this something you could replicate your existing MySQL database to in order
to have a hot spare? That might be a way to provide service to people who
aren't on EC2.

~~~
justinsb
Definitely possible - you get MySQL root on the box. If this is a popular
scenario we can also make it simple from our GUI..

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einarvollset
Congratulations Justin! Great job, looks super slick.

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charlesju
Now if FathomDB had a rails plugin that made it stupidly easy to shard, they'd
have a new customer.

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peter123
when will pricing be available? will there be a free tier?

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railsjedi
please let me into the beta! Railsjedi@gmail.com. My site opensourcerails.com
is going down every day because of dreamhosts shitty mysql server

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releasedatez
oh man, that is really a great idea! If this service was around 6 months ago,
ma.gnolia wouldn't have to go down.

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immad
Congrats Justin. Looks really impressive

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thingsilearned
Great work Justin!

