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MemSQL Makers Say They've Created the Fastest Database On the Planet
mikejuk writes "Two former Facebook developers have created a new database that they say is the world's fastest and it is MySQL compatible. According to Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov, MemSQL, the database they have developed over the past year, is thirty times faster than conventional disk-based databases. MemSQL has put together a video showing MySQL versus MemSQL carrying out a sequence of queries, in which MySQL performs at around 3,500 queries per second, while MemSQL achieves around 80,000 queries per second. The documentation says that MemSQL writes back to disk/SSD as soon as the transaction is acknowledged in memory, and that using a combination of write-ahead logging and snapshotting ensures your data is secure. There is a free version but so far how much a full version will cost isn't given." (See also this article at SlashBI.)
Really? Accessing RAM is faster than accessing a disk? What a novel discovery!
It seems to me that MySQL can also be run in memory. Apparently that's how the clustered database works (or used to work). I've never tried it, but let's see some benchmarks between MemSQL and an entirely memory-based MySQL.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Give me fast enough, robust, easy to administer and standards compliant. Maybe a little less fast means you throw more hardware at a problem, but it doesn't matter if overall the overall cost and risk is inflated. A platform decision boils down to three things: (1) is it good enough; (2) is it economical; (3) if we decide later this doesn't work for us, are we totally screwed.
In any case, there's no meaningful way you can make a claim that a database management system is the fastest on the planet. All you have is benchmarks, and different benchmarks apply to different use-cases.
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And then the next week, your toast would have changed from white bread to wholegrain and you're just going to have to get used to it.
As a long time SysAd/webmaster/developer, I'm certainly interested
At the risk of sounding incredibly condescending....
If you were really a sysadmin who could benefit from that kind of speed improvement, you'd know that it's possible to achieve that level of performance with MySQL already, by either running it from memory or by using a fast hard drive array. The simplest/cheapest option to drastically improve MySQL performance is to throw a large amount of RAM at a system and point MySQL at the memory. MySQL can be configured to keep the database in active memory and sync to the disk on a regular basis, which is almost exactly the kind of behaviour described for MemSQL... for an exceptionally large database that can't be stored in system memory, I imagine that the advantage that MemSQL is boasting would evapourate. There are other ways to go about doing it, such as running a fast disk array or a cluster, in order to get around the limitations of using RAM, but ultimately the prime determining factor for speed in MySQL is speed of access to the database file itself.