On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 02:44:16PM -0700, John Buckman wrote:
The other area where state of the art thinking is occurring, is in
scaling web sites to many, many machines.
Reputedly, the best toolkit for building that sort of stuff is Erlang
and its OTP libraries. (Asynchronous message passing, hot code
reloading, fault tolerance, etc.) I've also long wondered if its
Mnesia distributed RDBMS is any good.
I was quite happy with AOLserver, Tcl, and a decent single-box RDBMS
like Oracle or PostgreSQL. But if I intended to build stuff for
massive scale out, ideally I'd want to first hack seriously with
Erlang for a year or so first to really understand what it's good for,
what it's not, clever approaches the Erlang community came up with,
etc. If anybody here as done something along those lines and can
report back, compare/contrast to the AOLserver / Tcl / OpenACS world,
that could be really interesting!
A maybe related approach from the enterprise software world
(probably meaning giant investment banks), is Message-Oriented
Middleware; this is also asynchronous message passing. This guy (Kirk
Wylie, founder of OpenGamma) seems to know what he's talking about,
and recommended the Hohpe book below:
http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Integration-Patterns-Designing-Deploying/dp/0321200683/
Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging
Solutions
by Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woolf
Ousterhout recently wrote a paper about RAMCloud, which would be very helpful
on aolserver:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/7/109885-the-case-for-ramcloud/fulltext
Useful I guess, but that seems pretty low level. I'd rather look into
shared-nothing parallel RDBMSs. These were mostly intended for
analytic (date warehouse) loads, but there are OLTP-oriented designs
available now too (e.g. VoltDB, which also happens to be RAM-only).
I don't know how well they scale across modes. Years ago, I once
heard that, Teradata was only intended to scale to no more than 100 or
so fat nodes. But even if modern shared-nothing OLTP systems scale no
better, that's still about 100 times better than you could do with a
typical single server Oracle or PostgreSQL installation, which should
give you a lot of helpful leeway before you HAVE to develop and adopt
database sharding and/or more specialized tools, like the Digital City
team did.
The recent Calvin OLTP research is also interesting. Like RamCloud,
this is a lower-level tool, not a complete system. Unlike RamCloud
though, it seems like an actual tested advance in the state-of-the
art, not just a conceptual description of a cool piece of
infrastructure someone might want to build:
http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2012/05/if-all-these-new-dbms-technologies-are.html
--
Andrew Piskorski a...@piskorski.com
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