LoTR , Linux, and Database Management

minus23 writes: "Very interesting article over at Digitalanimators.com, talking about some of the challenges faced by the crew working on the second installment in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Interesting bits include managing an off-site database of 45TBs, Linux workstations from IBM, 1400 processors, and the animation methods to be used on Gollum. It's a good thing. :)"

Comments

Excuses to talk about OSS RDBMSs

[philovivero]

This story looks like a good excuse for me to share a little elation I have about Databases that are Free Software.

I've been a Database Administrator and Linux zealot for about 7 years now, and it always got under my skin that there are no good production-quality databases for Linux.

Then, a couple years back, Oracle, Sybase, IBM, and a few other giants made their RDBMSs available for Linux. So I upped the ante, and started complaining that there were no good Free Software databases that were production-quality for Linux.

Then, about nine months ago in New Zealand I started talking to a consultant who told me he'd successfully migrated a few clients off of Oracle onto Postgres. At the time, I was incredulous, because I'd previously reviewed Postgres and found it unsuitable for production systems.

Turns out, my information was outdated (things change FAST in the OSS arena).

Since then, I've been slowly, carefully, calmly trying to see if Postgres (and incidentally, MySQL) were ready for production databases.

Turns out, the answer is pretty much YES for Postgres and, sorry folks, still NO for MySQL.

Postgres is an amazing product. The version I'm running, which is fairly recent at 7.2.1 can create databases based on Oracle-complexity DDL, has good recoverability, stored procedures and triggers, and pretty much everything you'd expect in a full-fledged RDBMS.

They even have a few of those extra bits that aren't necessary but that some DBAs and DB developers like, such as a built-in language (PG/SQL I believe they call it) and ability to write stored procedures in esoteric and strange languages.

I've found their query tool (psql) to be the second-most powerful and useful query tool I've ever used (SQSH being the first).

Amazing product, this Postgres 7.2.1. And from reading the database administrators' mailing list, it's pretty obvious that there are some fairly large-size shops migrating from Oracle to Postgres or even just using Postgres as their main RDBMS.

Re:Excuses to talk about OSS RDBMSs

[philovivero]

I've never played with it so I'm not sure how well it works, but did you know that SAP Open sourced their database?

Hmmm. Do you mean to say you've never played with SAP DB either?

I'll admit, I'd never heard of SAP DB before your post. Going to the website you quote (sapdb.org) makes it look VERY promising.

Just a note, what I consider makes a production-quality RDBMS:

• Transaction support! Can't be stressed enough. Rollback and Rollforward recovery.
• Triggers to enforce referential integrity.
• Stored procedures (or another way to precompile queries and query plans).
• Commercial support. Since I'm paid ungodly sums of money, it's a waste of company resources for me to fix bugs. I need to be able to pay someone $2,000 per bug to fix it. No shit. On the other hand, Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase have crap support. I have to spend as much time explaining their stupid bug to them as it'd take me to fix it my own damn self. I have met good commercial support before, but you can be guaranteed the Big Boys don't have it.
• Stable, Stable, Stable. If you think Microsoft makes a good RDBMS, I bet you've never supported it in a very large installation.
• Well-thought-out architecture. Well, okay, Oracle's architecture is like spaghetti code personified, so it doesn't meet this criteria. But everyone likes Oracle because it's got everything else, plus a kitchen sink...

SAP DB, from the site, looks damn good. I'll probably take a look at it to see if it's a good contender for Postgres.

It is unfortunate that Postgres is licensed by Berkely license, not GPL. It means that SAP DB can steal code from Postgres and get better, but not the other way around, since SAP DB has been licensed GPL/LGPL.

Re:Excuses to talk about OSS RDBMSs

[dodobh]

There is a postgresql port, that ships with cygwin.
It is as simple as clicking setup.exe, downloading the postgresql binary and starting it.
The big problem is that postgreSQL doesn't run properly on NT as a service by default, you need something like firedaemon to start it.
The PgAccess GUI is available on windows as well, but it lacks a few features that psql supports.
Pg doesn't run on Win 9x at all, AFAIK.

Re:am i missing the point?

[Zeinfeld]

Call up any vendor. Tell them their systems are unstable out of the box. Think they're gonna say something like, "oh, yeah, just tweak this little setting...". I don't think the quote above is very logical; no vendor is going to be that helpful with stability issues. Maybe "stability issues" was just a poor choice of words?

Why is it that every time someone with real world experience of running Linux on a large scale talks of a problem the response is always that they must be either mistaken or stupid?

Fifteen years ago you could have made the same coment about running large scale UNIX clusters. Sure you could buy 64 RISC workstations and configure them in a farm, but you would end up rebooting a machine at least once an hour - I know because thats what I was doing fifteen years ago, only with rather more processors.

Experience of running a single machine or a small cluster of office or university machines is not applicable to running large scale systems. If you have a system that is using multiple processors in a single computational task you have to have both software that is designed for fault tolerance and a very high level of basic reliability. If you have a render wall of 256 processors and each one in standalone mode runs for a week without a crash you will end up dealling with a system crash every 40 minutes, most likely more frequently due to interactions between the machines.

This type of processing is the reason people used to pay a hefty premium for systems from folk like DEC who had lots of experience filling a room with machines and getting them to work reliably. Today that ability is the only thing keeping Sun afloat.

Re:Asset Management Issue?

[foobar104]

A homegrown content management system is really simple with todays scripting/filesystems/XML.

No offense, Malakai, but it's pretty clear that you've never worked on any kind of asset management system. It's a much harder problem than you give credit for. I write asset management systems for a living, so I've had a bit of experience here. A friend of mine, who now works with me, worked at ILM last year and this past spring; he was a compositor. I've talked to him for hours about ILM's asset management system. It's entirely home-grown. If anybody can do it right, you'd think ILM could. But my friend says that it's immensely frustrating in a lot of ways.

The things that were brought up in the article about Media 360 are not new; these are the same problems that all asset management system have to deal with. The biggest one being, of course, that, from the perspectives of the artists, it's easier not to use the system than it is to use it.

I'm amazed they stumbled on this, and even more amazed they payed for the Informix product (didn't IBM buy them, and drop that product anyhow?).

Informix spun the Media 360 product off into its own company, called Ascential. I've heard some ugly rumors about the health of that venture, but I probably shouldn't say anything specific.

Here you can compare it with Mysql and PostgreSQL

[Secure42]

You can find a pretty good comparison of SapDB with other Open Source Databases in http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/