rickn

(MemSQL VP of Product Management here)

We didn't intend the benchmarks to be a sales pitch. We are proud of the performance of MemSQL and what it has been able to achieve in our customers' workloads. We wanted a way to show what we are capable of with concrete numbers. We chose the standard benchmarks because they are well understood, not because they were necessarily representative of any given customer.

In general, benchmarks are useful to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a product at a basic level and how it compares to its peers, but we strongly encourage anyone evaluating their options to do a proper POC comparison on their actual use cases.

[Director of Product Management for MemSQL]

MemSQL has two storage modes Rowstore and Columnstore. The Rowstore is "in-memory" and the columnstore is "on-disk" but those are oversimplifications. The rowstore data is stored in memory but we keep a snapshot of the data on disk. We also keep the transaction log (a record of all changes since the snapshot was taken) also on disk. So queries can be satisfied fully from memory (because that is where the current data lives) but writes go to memory and to the transaction log on disk. If the machine reboots then the snapshot is loaded from disk back into memory and the transaction log is replayed. When that is complete you are back to where you were when the machine rebooted with no loss of committed data. Columnstore data is always stored on disk although we use a row store in front of the column store that is hidden from the user but acts as a buffer of sorts so that writes in the column store can be pretty fast. More details on how the columnstore works can be found here: https://docs.memsql.com/concepts/v6.7/columnstore/#how-the-m...

I am the Director of Product Management for MemSQL.

The 128 GB limit applies to the whole cluster. So if you have two nodes in the cluster they would each have to be 64GB or less. If you have four nodes they would all have to be 32 GB or less. To have a highly available system we recommend 4 nodes (a master aggregator, a child aggregator and two leaf nodes). You can read more about the cluster architecture here: https://docs.memsql.com/concepts/v6.7/distributed-architectu...

My name is Rick Negrin. I run the Product Management team at MemSQL, a scalable relational database. I recently wrote a blog on my thoughts regarding NoSQL vs. Relational Databases and I'd love to hear the community’s thoughts on this.