
How Clustrix does distributed SQL (It's impressive) - weel
http://www.clustrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/clustrix-whitepaper-01-no-on-sql-mysql-object-key-value-store-database-scaling.pdf
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bayareaguy
Sounds a lot like the HyPra / ClustRa system.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&dq=HypRa+C...](http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&dq=HypRa+ClustRa+parallel+Database&source=gbs_navlinks_s)

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phliar
You mean the Clustra that was acquired by Sun and renamed HADB? I used it, and
as far as I can remember, the HADB fault-tolerant story was that each node has
a mirror that takes over if the first fails; and it's basically all in-memory.
The Clustrix redundancy granularity is much finer, and everything is on disk.

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bayareaguy
I never worked with one, but I believe the HyPra system included disks (as
shown on page 148.
[http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&pg=PA148](http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&pg=PA148)
). I recall it was one of the earlier systems to achieve high transaction
rates by logging updates to memories of multiple replicas (described on page
181:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&pg=PA181](http://books.google.com/books?id=KH_kfSsMu80C&pg=PA181)
).

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phliar
Clustra/HADB did use disks (can't have all your data disappear if you turn off
the cluster!) but a running system was in-mem in operation -- if your database
was much bigger than the RAM available it was unusable. (I never used Hypra.)

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SpikeGronim
What's interesting to me is that they're selling this as an appliance, and a
high end one at that. They're using Infiniband networking and seven SSDs per
appliance. That's some serious cost. Their overall software design as
described in the white paper isn't that new or interesting IMO. Teradata and
others have been doing very similar things for a long time.

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sergei
As far as I know, no has a system like ours that can actually scale OLTP
workloads. Warehousing/Analytics databases are very different beast. Can you
point me at an OLTP system that I can expand without taking any loss of
availability? How about supporting online schema changes?

Infiniband ports cost less than 10GE right now. There's really nothing that
ties our architecture to IB. It's all about price/performance. When a
better/cheaper technology becomes more available, we'll switch to that.

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vibhavs
Very interesting white paper. (I didn't realize that Clustix is a YCombinator
company -- they're class of 2006.)

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sergei
And we're always looking to hire good engineers with skills in distributed
systems development.

<http://www.clustrix.com/about/careers/>

