News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by refset on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @03:29PM (#40731612)
Slightly off-topic but CedarDB is extremely exciting. It's the commercialization of the widely cited Umbra research DBMS [0] that has been in the works for several years, which benchmarks faster than DuckDB for OLAP [1] whilst simultaneously being really strong for transactional workloads. Also discussed recently here [2].

[0] https://umbra-db.com/

[1] https://cedardb.com/blog/ode_to_postgres/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40241150

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by riku_iki on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @04:31PM (#40732108)
> which benchmarks faster than DuckDB for OLAP [1]

that link doesn't do any performance comparison. They claim that CedarDB executes less "code branches" than duckdb, which may or may not translate to faster performance.

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by ChrisWint on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @04:50PM (#40732242)
Author of that blogpost here.

> less "code branches" than duckdb, which may or may not translate to faster performance.

In that case it was about 2.5x faster than DuckDB end to end, so a bit less than the difference in branches.

If you want to see some independent benchmarks on Umbra, our underlying technology, its currently first place on Clickbench [1]. You can compare against duckdb there as well.

[1] https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by riku_iki on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @04:54PM (#40732272)
clickbench is a toy benchmark: small dataset, very specific queries.

Benchmarking full tcp-h (not just one query like in your post) on sizable dataset (few TBs) would be very good close to real world scenario, but vendors usually avoid this.

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by pfent on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @05:00PM (#40732324)
There are TPC-H numbers in another post: https://cedardb.com/blog/simple_efficient_hash_tables/
Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by riku_iki on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @05:08PM (#40732392)
its great starting insight, but again its small dataset (100GB) which almost fits memory, and I think many details are missing (for example clickbench publishes all configs and queries, and more detailed report, so vendors can reproduce/optimize/dispute them).
Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by refset on Thursday June 20, 2024 @08:59AM (#40738261)
> small dataset (100GB)

What counts as large or small definitely varies a lot depending on the context of the conversation/analysis.

MotherDuck's "Big Data is Dead" post [0] sticks in mind:

> The general feedback we got talking to folks in the industry was that 100 GB was the right order of magnitude for a data warehouse. This is where we focused a lot of our efforts in benchmarking.

Another point of reference is [1]

> [...] Umbra achieves unprecedentedly low query latencies. On small data sets, it is even faster than interpreter engines like DuckDB

> TPC-H Small Dataset = 866k tuples, sf 0.1

[0] https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/

[1] https://db.in.tum.de/~kersten/Tidy%20Tuples%20and%20Flying%2...

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by riku_iki on Thursday June 20, 2024 @11:02AM (#40739527)
> The general feedback we got talking to folks in the industry was that 100 GB

and then user discovers that DuckDB is plagued with OOMs and dramatic performance degradations when his data is slightly larger than memory.

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by jauntywundrkind on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @04:34PM (#40732128)
A little sad finding out it's proprietary but to be expected I suppose.

It's neat seeing postgres gearing up for async support. There's also folks like OrioleDB doing massive revamps of postgres & doing disaggregated storage in public. https://github.com/orioledb/orioledb https://hn.algolia.com/?query=orioledb&sort=byDate

Oh they were bought by Suprabase two months ago... Fingers crossed! The Suprabase CEO commented at the time, with a nice basic overview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039138

Re:Why Your SSD (Probably) Sucks and What Your Database Can ... by pdimitar on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @05:13PM (#40732433)
It is Supabase, dude, _not_ SupRRRRRabase.