
Percona acquires Tokutek - matthewcford
http://www.percona.com/percona-acquires-tokutek
======
saganus
Kudos to the team!

This is probably not interesting to anyone, but I remember the first (and
only) time I published a paper, based on Mr. Farach-Colton's and Mr. Bender's
(specifically this paper [0]) work, and after presenting it someone in the
audience asked a few questions for which I was unprepared for.

After I finished my presentation I walked to the patio and got to meet the guy
that asked me those questions. Turns out that he was Martin Farach-Colton!

Got to chat with him and even went to eat something and he turned out to be a
really nice guy, laid back, not cocky at all. I mean, here there was a guy
that had done some great research on algorithms and other areas and that I
happen to admire a lot, just chatting with me, telling me about this Tokutek
project he was starting (at the time the website was just an "under
construction" page), and in general being an interesting person to talk to.

If anyone is remotely interested in a different way of obtaining the Least
Common Ancestor between two nodes in a tree, definitely check this paper out.
When I managed to understand why it works, it rekindled my love for algorithm
design.

[0] The LCA Problem Revisited -
[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=690192](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=690192)

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cheald
Congrats to the Tokutek team.

I'm nervous about what this means for TokuMX. We've used and loved it for a
few years now, but Percona is a MySQL company, not a MongoDB company. Support
on TokuMX has rather flagged over the last few months, and unless Percona
makes it a first-class citizen, I'm nervous that it's going to wither and die
in the face of MongoDB's new WiredTiger engine, which is approximately
equivalent (though not entirely comparable).

I'm hoping to be proved wrong, but it's probably time to start drafting
migration plans.

~~~
astral303
It is time. I think Tokutek saw the writing on the wall.

How revolutionary and how patent-encumbered is this fractal tree indexing? If
it's based on academic research, are there other B-tree variants or
improvements that accomplish some of the same advantages that Tokutek's
fractal tree indexing does?

Edit: found a paper comparing LSM trees to fractal trees from Tokutek's
architect: [http://insideanalysis.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/Tokutek...](http://insideanalysis.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/Tokutek_lsm-vs-fractal.pdf)

~~~
cheald
IIRC Tokutek (well, now Percona) holds patents on the FT indexing technology.

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Zarkonnen
Can someone give some context to this? I'm just seeing a corporatey website
with some all-caps text and my eyes glaze over.

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darkstar999
> some all-caps text

The section titles are capitalized. Come on.

~~~
softbuilder
I was wondering so I went to look. This is what I see:

"ACQUISITION ENABLES PERCONA TO EXPAND AND EXTEND OFFERINGS DRAMATICALLY
IMPROVING DATABASE PERFORMANCE WHILE LOWERING TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP FOR
CUSTOMERS"

I don't think the parent was exaggerating.

~~~
softbuilder
Someone care to explain the downvotes? I refuted and/or clarified an unhelpful
comment. And I'm correct.

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BhavdeepSethi
Congrats to the Tokutek team! TokuDB is one of the best MySQL storage engines
I've used!

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infocollector
Does anyone know the details of the deal? Equity of Founders Vs VCs at
acquisition? How many rounds of funding did the company take? How much did the
founders make?

