RethinkDB (YC S09) Raises $1.2 Million For Its Database For Solid-State Drives

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/rethinkdb-raises-1-2-million-for-its-database-for-solid-state-drives/

by jasonlbaptiste • 16 years ago

114 42 16 years ago

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

"There’s obviously risk involved with trying to redefine how people structure their databases"

TechCrunch misses the point that Rethink is explicitly not doing this. The MySQL engine is below the SQL parsing layer, so as-is MySQL apps should be able to run against it.

davidu• 16 years ago

That's in theory. In practice, MySQL has different syntax for different engines when you get into more esoteric queries.

helwr• 16 years ago

congratulations, Slava & Michael

pg• 16 years ago

Incidentally, if any hackers are looking for jobs working on an interesting problem, I know the Rethinks are hiring. It would be the perfect job for a lot of hackers. You'd get to solve big problems starting with a blank slate, and you'd get to work with smart, totally pragmatic people (Slava and Mike). Plus they now have enough to actually pay you.

quickpost• 16 years ago

Not to mention they are very transparent with their compensation and stock options (Scroll down - http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/). People who run their hiring process and business like that seem like very good people to work for indeed.

wheaties• 16 years ago

Not bad compensation for a start-up.

rms• 16 years ago

That's really, really cool. I've never seen the stock options/equity listed on a hiring page before.

cperciva5• 16 years ago

I would jump on this immediately if I was in the bay area and didn't already have my own startup. As it is, I'll have to satisfy my (data)base urges by writing my own high performance SSD-optimized key-value store.

ntoshev• 16 years ago

Wow, are the metadata of Tarsnap that demanding?

andrewcooke4• 16 years ago

i was looking at this the other day. how do they address (what i assume are) the larger space requirements of append-only databases with the lower capacities of ssds? am i wrong about the space requirements, or is moore's law going to fix it, or is there some kind of background compaction?

coffeemug5• 16 years ago

A couple of points:

- We garbage collect (see Mendel Rosenblum's Ph.D. thesis on log-structured systems)

- Our customers care about cost per IOPS, not cost per GB.

- The hot real-time stuff is usually handled by a different database and/or storage system than the older, less frequently accessed data anyway.

andrewcooke4• 16 years ago

thanks. if anyone else is curious, this seems to be the thesis - http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1992/6267.html

runT1ME4• 16 years ago

Will you guys be able to support all isolation levels?

jganetsk• 16 years ago

Is there really a need for segment cleaning as Rosenblum lays it out?

They clean segments to reduce fragmentation and allow for decent-sized extents to write new data into. Since your writes don't need to be long and contiguous, do you really need to empty the live data out of segments?

You DO need to identify which snapshots are stale, and consequently mark certain blocks as free. But I see no need for compaction.

vladocar• 16 years ago

This is very interesting project, all the current DB are optimized for normal HD(and the standard HD is the slowest part of our PC). But with development of the Solid-State Drives we will have more and more fast drives. So the Database who will take advantage of the these new SSDrives will lead the way in Database design technology. It is right time to invest in this technology.

jrockway5• 16 years ago

But really, rotating disks are not that bad for most database use cases. B-trees, the usual on-disk database structure, are designed to keep similar data on the same disk page, which means that if you request row 42, row 43 will be in memory by the time you need it. So the slowness of the disk is abstracted away; iterate over your data in index order, and it's always fast.

Hash tables have a theoretical advantage over balanced trees, and an SSD would make a naive hash table implementation easier to implement. But if you are smart (like, say, BerkeleyDB), hash tables and balanced trees have almost the same real world performance.

RethinkDB might be better for write-heavy operations, but that's because SSDs are better for random writes.

runT1ME4• 16 years ago

But the lack of locking is potentially big for multicore applications.

coffeemug5• 16 years ago

if you request row 42, row 43 will be in memory by the time you need it

True, but this is rarely the case for OLTP workloads. What happens when there is a credit card transaction with a user ID 100731, followed by a credit card transaction with a user ID 8762592? Even for range queries, what you're saying is true only if you're walking through the primary index. The second you start walking through the secondary indices, you're back to random read land (my Facebook friends, for example, are extremely unlikely to be stored in the user table sequentially).

SSDs are better for random writes

Random writes are very tricky on SSDs because of the slow erase operation. The FTL controllers are getting much better at this on micro benchmarks, but it's very difficult to measure random write performance profile over different timelines and different disk space utilization scenarios.

mlLK• 16 years ago

Congratulations guys, you deserve it, and thank you to anybody else out there writing drivers or optimizing software for changes happening in hardware that we all take for granted.

spicyj• 16 years ago

Does the iPhone really have an SSD?

CrazedGeek• 16 years ago

It uses flash memory, so yes. http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

It says "maintanence" on their technical details page. Hopefully they can fix that.

mglukhovsky• 16 years ago

Fixed, thank you for pointing it out.

ALee• 16 years ago

Big congrats. Smart people tackling tough problems get my vote of confidence.

known• 16 years ago

Can't we implement RethinkDB as features of MySQL or PostgreSQL

RethinkDB (YC S09) Raises $1.2 Million For Its Database For Solid-State Drives

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