One big differentiating feature between TokuDB and other write optimized databases is that TokuDB is fully transactional, it is ACID compliant. There is a demand for this.
AFAIK, TokuDB is the only write-optimized transactional data store. We (I work at Tokutek) are working on integrating with MongoDB as we speak, and when we do, we will bring transactional semantics to MongoDB in addition to improved performance.
So, I think there is still a big demand out there that TokuDB will be able to meet
My impression was that TokuDB is a single-server database, as a backend for MySQL. In that case it wouldn't be a direct competitor to HBase and Cassandra, both of which you normally wouldn't even consider unless you expect to have a cluster of machines.
You'd arguably be taking a risk by choosing a centralized database for write-heavy applications, which are the hardest to scale, but I could see it as a good fit for the applications where people currently use sharded MySQL.
Re:TokuDB open sourced
by brianatdts on Monday April 22, 2013 @04:57PM
(#5591729)
Cassandra and HBase Shard, they just shard differently since the shard is baked into the system while in MySQL its not. If you get right down do it, When you Shard on Toku, it will simply be more efficient at a storage level.
But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-optimized databases.
If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.