

Rackspace & Drizzle: It's Time to Rethink Everything - angelabartels
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2010/03/13/rackspace-and-drizzle-its-time-to-rethink-everything/

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chime
Maybe I'm one of the rare few but I've had innodb files getting corrupted with
no way to rebuild them. When my 10GB database got 100% unreadable, I gave up
on MySQL for anything that's mission critical. I don't care why the DB got
corrupted and why stuff like this (
[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/04/recovering-
in...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/04/recovering-innodb-table-
corruption/) ) didn't work. I just don't want to ever be burned like that
again. Sure I had a complete backup of the DB but it takes a long time to
restore 10GB over the net.

Drizzle is using innodb too. How do I know the same thing's not gonna happen
again? I much rather like the MyISAM .frm files because if one table gets
corrupted, I can restore just that table from backup. Innodb corruption
destroys the entire database.

Also, will Drizzle innodb finally get full-text search? That's the only reason
people still use MyISAM tables. However, MyISAM locks the full-table so that
becomes a bottleneck pretty soon.

Honestly, here's what I want from Rackspace and I will pay good money for it
the next time I need a good SQL db: Give me a fast, reliable SQL db that works
like MySQL, lets me do full-text searching without locking the whole table,
and lets me change table structure without locking the whole table. Also, I
don't ever want to worry about replication, syncing, sharing etc. Make this a
cloud service. Amazon's SimpleDB comes nowhere close to a decent MySQL setup.
Give me the features of MySQL in a cloud but without the hassles. And I'll pay
for it.

Other than SimpleDB, I don't know one decent cloud db. Everyone talks about
Cassandra, Redis, Postgres, and tons of other DBs but I don't want to manage
yet another large database system. I want to write queries and build my app. I
really think there's a big opportunity for a startup that offers a reliable
cloud db service. Of course, there will be a fixed latency on every DB call
but I think an overhead of 100-200ms/page is acceptable for never having to
worry about the backend DB.

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timdorr
As far as fulltext search goes, have you looked at Sphinx?
<http://www.sphinxsearch.com/> Plugs into MySQL and Drizzle, works _really_
fast, and has awesome extras like stemming support.

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chime
Yeah, I've tried that and many other things. It's just yet another thing I
have to worry about when I am making my app. I don't have to worry about TCP
buffers or filesystems or RAM allocation. Similarly, I don't want to worry the
backend that runs my app. I just want to use it.

~~~
jhancock
I've been down the full text search path a few times; never fun, too many
compromises and too much work. Just last week I used Sunspot solr
<http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot> for a new site and wow, what a breath of
fresh air. Its the first turnkey FTS I've found. Sunspot is a ruby lib built
on solr's ruby lib. But it comes with solar embedded in the gem, scripts to
startup/shutdown, complete config files...it just works!!! Add to that, my new
app needed to do FTS for Chinese. I was expecting headaches and digging
through Java XML hell...nope, it just worked.

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lapusta
Does it have any improvements on table locking during ALTER operations? Or are
there any other engines capable of dynamic DB schema?

~~~
david927
Put your email in your profile or contact me.

