from Hacker News

zBase – A high-performance, elastic, distributed key-value store

by slynux on 9/19/13, 5:50 AM with 24 comments

• by noelwelsh on 9/19/13, 7:36 AM

  I don't understand what this offers that isn't offered by, say, Riak. Riak ticks all the same big feature boxes as zBase (distributed, elastic KV-store that persists to disk) and has the advantage that Someone Else (i.e. Basho) is paying for development.

• by slynux on 9/19/13, 7:32 AM

  If you look at the key features, following are the attractive points about zBase:

  - LRU based or random eviction based cache management.

  - Support for multiple disks and thereby IO parallelism.

  - Incremental Backup and Restore (You can pack 5x .. 10x size of RAM in ZBase and make use of incremental backups for node failover)

  - Incremental backup helps to offer Blob level restore in hourly, daily and weekly granularities)

  - Cluster manager - ZBase operates by partitioning entire data into virtual buckets and servers act as containers to hold these vbuckets. Hence provides scalable ways to increase or decrease the number of servers in a cluster.

• by RyanZAG on 9/19/13, 6:46 AM

  That dynamic resharding looks very nice. The big issue I see for using this as a real datastore is the apparent lack of queries and indexes on the data. Keeps it a lot simpler I guess, but so many workloads require the use of queries. I guess you'd load the data into some other system for querying and just use this for storage? Or would you use another database for storing the data, and load it into zBase for quick access to buckets?

• by danmaz74 on 9/19/13, 6:59 AM

  Anybody cares to compare this to Redis?

  EDIT: To clarify, I know Redis, I'm interested in learning how this differs beyond its distributed nature.

• by maniktaneja on 9/19/13, 10:26 AM

  Note that Zynga's workload is typically very write heavy and zBase has been designed to support just that. in fact its one of the largest No-SQL d/b deployments with over 6000+ nodes in production.

• by continuations on 9/19/13, 8:32 AM

  This sounds somewhat like RethinkDB, although I don't believe RethinkDB has dynamic resharding.

  Other than the dynamic resharding part, how do zBase and RethinkDB compare to each other?

• by lowglow on 9/19/13, 8:37 AM

  Hey look at all that hard work those people that got fired put in! Yay Zynga!

• by JeremyMorgan on 9/19/13, 7:25 AM

  Looks neat and all, but I have a hard time getting behind anything Zynga is doing...