Skip to main content

Have I started hating mysql and falling in love with distributed databases

It seems Mysql is rock solid if you want:
  1. Transactions
  2. ACID support
So I would still recommend mysql for any thing that is mission critical data and is the primary datastore for your transactions. But what about derived data or analytical data?

I had built large scale cluster of mysql server storing metadata about billions of files and folders used by tens of thousands of customers daily and its scaling fine and working good, its still growing at a healthy rate and holding up.  But this requires a lot of baby sitting if you have 100s of nodes and you need to do
  1. replication
  2. add more nodes
  3. rebalancing data
  4. monitoring entire cluster
  5. Sharding
  6. Backup/restore
You have to write a lot of tooling and lot of monitoring/babysitting to scale the cluster. Plain stock Mysql will scale up to a limit but vertically scaling has its own issues. So +1 for Mysql but not everything should be stuffed there.

But recently me and my team built full text indexing on same dataset using elasticsearch and it seems so far it hasn’t disappointed me. With just 1 engineer and 1 devops guy we are able to build a cluster per datacenter
to store same data. The thing I liked most about elastic search was half way through migration we started facing performance issues and we just added more nodes and the cluster rebalanced itself.  Also elastic search has tools like kopf/HQ where I can monitor all nodes in one places.  For e.g. this is one of the smallest cluster that we just started migrating and as it grows if we see high load averages then we can add more data or client nodes.















I dont need an army of dbas to manage the cluster as elasticsearch has built in support for
  1. replication
  2. add more nodes
  3. rebalancing data
  4. monitoring entire cluster
  5. Sharding
I had earlier built an event store to store events on top of mysql but I was storing only few months of events into it. Now I have to build a store that can store events for 7 years and I dont want to use Mysql for it as I dont want to baby sit it. Our events data is way way more than the metadata. Because every change to a file generates an event and over 7 years this could be a huge no of records. I dont want to manage an army of mysql servers so researching for some database that has good querying support and can store long lived data with eventual consistency and rock solid durability.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adventures of a nature lover - 5 national parks in 14 days

To unplug from work and recharge myself I do a 2-3 week trip every year where I am unplugged. Few of the reasons I can totally unplug from work is Unlimited Vacation policy of Egnyte,  Excellent support by the Infrastructure team  Our ethos of pro-actively fixing issues before they become nuisance. TLDR; It's a long post so you can scroll down and first see see images if you need motivation to read it entirely. Me and my family like national parks and camping to recharge us as there is no cell phone  coverage in parks and you are completely unplugged from technology most of the times. We have done many of the national parks nearby and this year we want to see glacier national park as the glaciers may disappear in 10-15 years so see them before they are gone. Behind every successful trip is a "Trip planner" and for our family its my wife, she researched  and made a trip itinerary book. She booked camp sites 6 months in advance She researched trail...
2 comments
Read more

Compartmentalization helps with Deep Work

I had been trying to learn Solidity/Ethereum over the weekends for the past few months and the first 3-4 weekends were a drag as no matter what I do I wasnt able to focus and getting no where. The problem was not with motivation as I was trying to do it for many weeks but all I was able to do was read 100s of blog posts about it but not able to code anything. Aparently I realized that on weekdays most of my work is in the "study" room whereas on weekend I was trying to do it in the living room. Now working in study on wekeend was an issue as it felt more like work than fun so last 2 weekends I tried changing the schedule and went 3 hours every Sunday to library with my son and while he was reading books I was coding in solidity. I also had trouble writing code after 7:00 PM as I thought my brain was tired but last week I tried sitting in study around 10:00 -11:00 in night and boy I was able to focus and code. Net Net I realized that: "Having a consistent Routine ...
Post a Comment
Read more

IPhone will beat DSLR in long run

I started taking interest in photography recently and have accumulated a decent amount of gear but I am realizing that the ease of taking out your phone and clicking picture will beat the DSLR in long run. A friend recently visited me from NY and we wanted to take a family picture and I was setting up Tripod and Flash and doing settings changes and he was like leave all this, lets take a Selfie and that’s it, in 2 second the picture was done and he shared it on facebook in another 1 second.  Now one can argue that DSLR would have clicked a better picture but DSLR has many things going against it:- Learning curve : I must have spent 200+hours on reading about photography but still cant take decent pictures as my bar is high. Not everyone is interested in spending this much time. Amount of gear to be carried : On hikes its a pain to carry your DSLR whereas your phone has to be anyway with you. Cognitive effort of tweaking the gear: You have to have a different lens/settings for d...
2 comments
Read more