

How InnoDB lost its advantage - jaytaylor
http://dom.as/2015/04/09/how-innodb-lost-its-advantage/

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juliangregorian
Seems like for whatever reason RocksDB has decided to shit all over MySQL and
Mongo lately, which is an interesting strategy because they are both capable
of using RocksDB storage engines.

[http://objectrocket.com/blog/how-to/experimental-
pluggable-s...](http://objectrocket.com/blog/how-to/experimental-pluggable-
storage-engines-in-mongodb)
[https://github.com/MySQLOnRocksDB/mysql-5.6/](https://github.com/MySQLOnRocksDB/mysql-5.6/)

Also interesting is that Mongo has just moved to WiredTiger storage engine,
which is beating RocksDB in benchmarks.

[http://symas.com/mdb/inmem/](http://symas.com/mdb/inmem/)

~~~
Titanous
Facebook makes RocksDB. The MySQL forked you linked is maintained by Facebook.
The blog post is from a Facebook engineer who works on MySQL at Facebook. The
tweet linked in the blog post is from a Parse engineer talking about using
MongoDB with a RocksDB storage backend. Parse is a Facebook product.

I don't see how any of that is attacking MySQL or MongoDB, just their stock
storage engines.

~~~
juliangregorian
Yes, should say Facebook makes RocksDB. So Facebook engineer points out how
shit InnoDB has become and how RocksDB is gonna eat its lunch. Facebook/Parse
engineer is called in to hoot about space utilisation, which is suspect as no
info given as to how much data was duplicated on the Mongo replica set, but
safe to assume it was at least 3 times. Which means RocksDB was 2.6x more
space-efficient. Okay, but if the Mongo replica set had 5 members RocksDB is
only 1.5x more space-efficient. Mongo doesn't really optimize for space
efficiency, because updates are ideally done in place and documents are
normally padded to make that easier. On the other hand RocksDB is aggressively
optimizing for space usage, as well as this particular case being a fresh
import (no fragmentation). So it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to
crow about it, especially since it comes with a loss of redundancy.

I'd say some shit has been cast.

~~~
midom
It was conversion from standard MongoDB to RocksDB based MongoDB, so replica
count calculations don't really apply.

And yes, Mongo did not optimize for space efficiency, which is why there're
efforts to optimize for space efficiency.

Just like there were efforts to optimize InnoDB for space efficiency, that
stalled and got derailed by these hole punching ideas.

InnoDB did not become shit, it just stalled and did not progress in an area
where lots of innovation is happening elsewhere (and there were possible
avenues for optimization), so it may become less relevant.

As the post [title] said, InnoDB lost its advantage.

P.S. I wrote the original post.

~~~
juliangregorian
> It was conversion from standard MongoDB to RocksDB based MongoDB

Well that would have been relevant information to put in the article now
wouldn't it?

~~~
nemothekid
Its probably caused by a misunderstanding. RocksDB is just a "library" \- not
really a database in the sense that you can connect to it and query it.

So to someone well understood in the space going from RocksDB to MongoDB
without mentioning any sort of front end is meaningless. It would be like
going from Postgres to Sqlite.

~~~
juliangregorian
What are you going on about? You can absolutely use RocksDB standalone, as you
can Postgres and SQLite.

------
PhantomGremlin
I don't understand the nuances and fighting over what database is better.

So the key takeaway for me is the reminder that persistent storage is
generally no longer spinning rust. Programs and operating systems should
evolve to take advantage of the different strengths and weaknesses of flash
based storage.

------
eisvogel
Why is there an apostrophe in "its"?

~~~
kbenson
There's not supposed to be one. It makes no sense to say "How InnoDB lost _it
is_ advantage" so it's not supposed to have an apostrophe. It took me
_decades_ to internalize that rule, and even now, I accidentally do the wrong
thing.

[http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/its.html](http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/its.html)

~~~
ams6110
Queue my tenth grade English teacher: "It's a wise dog that scratches its own
fleas."

~~~
jdub
"Cue". :-)

~~~
reubenmorais
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

