hazaskull · HackerTrans

vor 25 Tagendiscuss

I would imagine this was written by someone not from the US.

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks. I think that only covers the commercial bits they run themselves though:

  "The entire database with all its features (including the enterprise ones) is licensed under the Apache License 2.0


  The binaries that contain -managed in the artifact and help run a managed service are licensed under the Polyform Free Trial License 1.0.0."

EDIT: formatting

hazaskull

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I was under the impression that Yugabyte requires signing a CLA to contribute which leads me to avoid it for fear of them relicensing the thing when the VC's start squeezing. Also: very unique and single vendor driven. Seems like too much of a risk longer term but that is just my take.

EDIT: in response to your question I did run a PoC of it but it had issues where I wasn't able to create very large indexes without the statement timing out on me. Basic simple hand-benchmarking of complex joins on very large tables were very slow if they finished at all. I suppose systems like this and cockroach really need short, simple statements and high client-concurrency rather than large, complex queries.

hazaskull

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Hi there! Thank you for the post and your work on pgzx! Though it depends on the system (cockroachdb can place leaders on specific nodes to speed up local queries, it has global tables and otherwise there's always follower-reads) those are of course valid reasons. Admittedly if you want to keep data "pinned", you're into manual placement, rather than horizontal scaling but that's nitpicking and there's pros and cons. I do enjoy the freedom of Postgres and am hopeful that its virtually prehistoric storage-design becomes a non-issue thanks to tech such as Neon and Orioledb. The option to decouple storage would provide wonderful flexibility for solutions like yours too I think.

hazaskull

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

While it is fun to see how to creatively solve such issues, it does raise the question of managability. When sharding data into loosely (fdw) coupled silo's it would become tricky to make consistent backups, ensure locking mechanisms work when sharded data might sometimes be directly related, handle zone/region failures gracefully, prevent hot spots, perform multi-region schema-changes reliably, etc. I suppose this pattern principally only works when the data is in fact not strongly related and the silo's are quite independent. I wouldn't call that a distributed system at all, really. This may be a matter of opinion of course.

It does give a "When all you have is a hammer..." vibe to me and begs the question: why not use a system that's designed for use-cases like this and do it reliably and securely ? i.e.: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/multiregion-overvi... (yes, I know full data domiciling requires something even more strict but I currently don't know of any system that can transparently span the globe and stay performant while not sharing any metadata or caching between regions)

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Thank you for the correction. Indeed it is not entirely the same thing. Though I'd expect that at least the benefit of not having to read columns that aren't in the family would still help (haven't tried in earnest). I suppose compression is not an option though.

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Was unable to edit my previous. It does use vectorization: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/vectorized-executi...

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Indeed. As I commented alsewhere this is just about the general design. It is not targeting OLAP in this case (even though I do believe cockroach employs vectorization for reads)

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

No expert but I'd say you'd rather be looking at bigquery, Redshift, Clickhouse, Snowflake, etc.

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

They don't optimize for it and I suppose the data distribution is primarily aimed at parallel OLTP rather than OLAP. Just wanted to mention that design-wise it is similar but that's indeed not all there is to it. I'd be hesitant to store large volumes of data on a single PG instance; don't see how a single-writer, filesystem-based database is suitable at all for data that is large enough to warrant columnar storage

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Not Postgres-based (but wire- and mostly syntax-compatible): cockroachDB using column families is much like a columnar MPP. Yugabyte is PG-based and MPP but not columnar.

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

...and then there is me using

  echo "75000000" | sudo tee /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl\:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw

to cap my i7-10700 to prevent it from overpowering the system fan by peaking to 200+ watts.

hazaskull

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Not to say that I disagree with you in principle but I'd think there is a large difference between disagreeing with someone's opinions and disagreeing with someones values. You generally can't have a meaningful conversation in the latter case.

hazaskull

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Personally I find the idea of a very small cartel of companies holding all the cards quite dystopian. There are certain people that I very much would not like to be in control of all that. Guess I'm not ready to accept the supposed inevitability of this end game.

hazaskull

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

The way I read it is simply a broadly applicable notion that a certain type of people will demonstrate their power and (perceived) higher status over others by openly breaking the others' rules without consequence. EDIT for better wording

hazaskull

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Ah well, we're all humans with our own blind focus on specific wants and needs. Most managers are not maniacs. Our capitalistic society just has a lot of bad incentives that are hard to change without damaging its good parts. Spreading power helps to balance things out. I know unions have a bad rep in the US but they do have good merit where government is laissez faire and no, we do not need to go heavy socialist (not meant to imply you were advocating for such). In general I'd wish we'd focus a bit more on societal stability than economic output but we need both.

hazaskull

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Honestly I think your comment shows part of the problem here, though I do understand your point. But if "mere" employees feel that they are personally in competition with basically the rest of the world it easily becomes a war of attrition and employees become kind of soldier-ants. I'd rather be my own person thank you very much. People can in fact be loyal and productive in 8 hours per day without being a slacker and maybe have some energy left to partake in society outside of work. Nobody likes people with a bad work-ethic but if a good work-ethic is considered to require regular overtime than maybe it's time to reconsider that concept.

hazaskull

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

52. Not been pulling all-nighters (okay maybe once or twice in exceptional circumstances that were also appreciated as such by the management after) as I've always believed your point to be right. If you're not (in part) owning the company then it should not be your life unless you don't have one and don't care. To each his own but an environment where overtime is the norm (even if driven by employees themselves) is not a healthy place to be when you have a family. Besides, when a company is so successful to need more than the normal hours available then the onus is on the leadership to hire more people; it's in their best interest to not have to rely on such devotion. ...and if crunch-time is instead caused by the company _not_ being successful and not having the money to hire people then toxicity is pretty much guaranteed in short order.

hazaskull

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Counter example. I switched from Linux to Windows because I find its desktop-experience to be superior. In my mind software and hardware is evolving at a rate that makes it impractical to support the notion that I could usefully modify it myself so it mostly comes down to trust. Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Looking at being able to access old data and run old programs I feel MS have been doing a great job. Now if they come up with a way for me to make sure that my data is in some standardized format AND protected in such a way that I could reasonably expect nobody (not even MS) to read it (but still be able to offload it elsewhere) I’d be entirely happy.

hazaskull

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Needed to create one for a long time ;) General cpu-bound tasks seem fine in a vm; i/o is definitely slower but much to my surprise linux’s ext4 filesystem is so much more efficient (?) than ntfs for small files that even inside a vm (vbox or wsl) git actions are noticably quicker than on native Windows! I’d prefer is wsl2 for convenience over vbox if I could but my VPN is indeed the dealbreaker and corp. won’t support any other VPN software

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