from Hacker News

HyperDex: Super-charging your NoSQL with a Strongly Consistent Datastore

by ziyadb on 8/10/12, 12:53 PM with 13 comments

  • by sbhat7 on 8/10/12, 2:07 PM

  • by karterk on 8/10/12, 1:59 PM

    I am in the middle of evaluating HyperDex. It's still early stages, but it's very promising when you want to slice and dice your data on multiple dimensions.

    Having said that, I had trouble stopping and/or restarting the cluster in a clean way. To make me even consider using it on production, it should also offer me ways to backup data and as well as convince me that future upgrades will be somewhat smooth.

  • by petercooper on 8/10/12, 1:00 PM

    Bypassing the content, I love the idea of having a suggested soundtrack for a blog post! - along with the link to actually hear it :-)

  • by cmancini on 8/10/12, 1:50 PM

    I was wondering how long it would take for HyperDex to get some traction on HN. While I haven't had immediate need to use it myself, I have several friends who attest that it is a lovely system. The article doesn't mention it, but it's wicked fast, outperforming Redis in many metrics. Clearly the consistency is the big kicker though. So many systems are saying eventual consistency is "good enough." Clearly that can be fine for a SoLoMo app, but probably not for a medical system.

  • by jperras on 8/10/12, 3:24 PM

    Neat. From a very cursory glance at the HyperDex paper, it looks like a distributed kd-tree with the addition of a single-dimensional key subspace (to use their terminology). The real clever part, I believe, is the value-dependent chaining for the deterministic propagation of changes/deletion of objects.

    Very cool.

  • by nateberkopec on 8/10/12, 2:57 PM

    NoSQL/SQL trolling aside, doing data lookup in a hyperspace is such a great idea. Being able to slice my data on hyperplanes is such a useful and cool feature.

  • by peterwwillis on 8/10/12, 6:30 PM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTf-iAWfvS4

    I think it's weird when people believe there's a tool that will do their job for them, like a hammer that builds a roof by itself.

    I'm sure HyperDex is totally useful for some cases, but it has clear disadvantages when you try to use it for what it wasn't intended (like global HP databases). All of a sudden you find yourself building glue to make it fit with your hybrid architecture. Instead you could take something simple and customize it, and build a huge successful business off of it, like the biggest sites in the world do currently with various tools that weren't engineered to solve simple problems like the number of round trips to look up an object.