MemSQL Launches Unlimited Community Edition

[stock_toaster]

  > The Community Edition is distributed as an executable 
  > binary and is a free edition of the commercial MemSQL 
  > Enterprise Edition. You are free to download and use 
  > MemSQL Community Edition within your organization.

So.. how long until the same thing happens as happened with FoundationDB?

[capkutay]

I think the FoundationDB acquisition by a company with no interest in selling enterprise products was an anomaly. A popular, commercial enterprise storage system that actually makes money would be an acquisition target from the likes or Oracle, SAP, EMC, etc...in that scenario, the acquiring company would have significant interest to increase adoption of the product and maintain the developer community versus completely shutting the product down.

[rjonesx]

While I am an enterprise user of memSQL now, I still have a machine running the beta version 1.0 from years back. It is still stable and still fast as hell.

[tjholowaychuk]

My thoughts exactly. Be careful people!

[phamilton]

Cue "Call me maybe, MemSQL"

Aphyr's posts (taken with appropriate amounts of salt) have become the authority on marketing claims. That said, many solutions are perfectly viable with their shortcomings, but knowing what those shortcomings are is essential.

[nikita]

When MemSQL is configured for synchronous durability and all databases are configured with synchronous replication, Jepsen confirms that writes to MemSQL are durable and acknowledged appropriately. As part of testing for the 4.0 release, we used the jepsen network partition test and observed data durability equivalent to Postgres(https://aphyr.com/posts/282-call-me-maybe-postgres) e.g. the scalability of a cluster with the durability of a single node machine. As part of running this test, we noticed some opportunities to do some cool performance optimizations. Stay tuned for a blog post to follow!

[ericfrenkiel]

Eric, one of the cofounders, here. happy to answer any questions on MemSQL 4 and the community edition. Some new features in MemSQL 4:

- fully distributed joins

- native geospatial index and datatypes

- lots of new SQL surface area

- concurrency improvements

- analytic optimizer

- Spark, HDFS, and S3 connectors

[mbesto]

Hi Eric!

Not sure if you remember me, but we spoke several (5?) years ago when you guys first started. I was the SAP HANA guy and I think we were talking about the landscape of in-memory solutions back then. First off, congrats on the success so far. Second, a few questions:

- How is MemSQL comparing to HANA and Vertica? My understanding is that MemSQL provides the same infrastructure (columnar in-memory based storage) of those solutions but will run on commodity hardware (HANA for example is hardware-vendor locked).

- One of the interesting topics that has come up in the HANA space is that it's expensive to maintain and scale. Specifically, provisioning new servers for data growth and archiving old data out of memory. Are these issues present at all in MemSQL?

- Lots of your customers seem to be using it for company-specific strategic solutions. Are any using it for operations? (like financial close reporting, or as a transactional DB)

[jamesblonde]

Interesting. We've implemented a metadata layer for HDFS and YARN using NDB (MySQL Cluster) - that also supports READ COMMITTED transactions. Do you support:

- row-level locking

- independent transaction coordinators at data nodes

- pruned index scans

- network-aware transactions (with user-defined partition keys for tables)

- any asynchronous/event API

?

[aemadrid]

What is the replication picture for the community version? I can see that Enterprise has HA features but I have to guess that there is some form of safety if one node goes down in Community.

[darkxanthos]

What's the catch here? :)

[menegattig]

Our company (Simbiose) recently did a strong stress test with memSQL with billions of JSON rows, using complex JOIN queries and the results are simply AMAZING.

[jansc]

  > While you are free to use Community for your projects,
  > MemSQL does not support or endorse using it in production.

(http://blog.memsql.com/memsql-community-edition/)

Ehhh. Do they mean that the Community Edition is only usable for development?

[ericfrenkiel]

for critical deployments, the enterprise version has high availability, cross data center replication, and more. you can use the free edition however you please.

[rjonesx]

I currently use beta 1.0 for one of my tools and it has been functioning for years without a problem. I think they are just saying don't sue us if you use in production and didn't pay for it :-)

[superlogical]

The CloudFormation cluster generator tool they have is really cool. (http://cloud.memsql.com/cloudformation) The templates it generates are pretty complex, I wonder if that is hand written or using some kind tool.. would anyone be able to shed some light on how they did it? Do you think most of it is hand coded? I've been playing around with the .NET SDK in VisualStudio 2013.. it includes a cloud formation project type, and you can type out the JSON with Intellisense which is pretty cool.

[ankrgyl]

Hi @superlogical, thank you for using it and for the kind feedback! CloudFormation by itself provides some very basic level of conditional/looping logic, but we found that it was not enough yet to provide a stellar experience. So, when you fill out the form on cloud.memsql.com, we auto-generate a template (we wrote the code to do this) that matches the parameters you filled in, upload it to an S3 bucket on our account, and then expose it as a download or via GET directly to your AWS account (i.e. you own the hardware/database/data).

[aklarfeld]

This is way cool. Already spinning it up on my AWS clusters. Such a quick setup. Super stoked to us it.

[rjonesx]

It is way cool. I've been an enterprise user for some time now and am excited to get to use it on other projects for which there wasn't cost justification in the past.

[BradRuderman]

When can we expect windowing functions, specifically row_number, rank, count, lead, lag, by partition.

[aristus]

All I can say is "it's on the roadmap." :) I used to do a lot of analytics at Facebook and am now a PM at MemSQL, so it's one of my priorities.

[matt2000]

Would love to hear from any existing users on their experiences so far (assuming that's allowed under previous licenses). Choosing a database is one of those decisions where I tend to go with the safest, well known option, but maybe I'm missing out.

[rjonesx]

I have been an enterprise user and had the luxury of using the 4 beta for the last month or so. I run a cluster of 18 machines with 192 cores and 540GB of RAM.

Impressions:

memSQL is remarkably stable. I actually have one machine running the old memSQL 1.0 beta that has not rebooted in months. 4.0 has similarly stable. The only problems happen when you run too many other processes on the aggregators (which is really just me being stupid).

Speed is great and the wire compliance with mySQL makes it very easy to develop for. To be honest, the "keeping the data in memory" part isn't the best part, it is the query compiling. It is incredibly fast. Often a query that takes 30sec to 1min to execute will compile down to fractions of a second. It is very cool to watch and never gets old.

We are looking to literally move all of our internal stuff to memSQL community edition while keeping our customer tools on enterprise.

[olig15]

Slightly off-topic: The font weight is too light to read properly on my PC (Widows 8.1, Chrome). Stopped reading because it was too much effort to try and read.

[peterplaylyfe]

Lol. I got what i asked for in the quora question?

[DannoHung]

Are there any optimizations or explicit support for proximate ordered joins?

[nikita]

Could you please elaborate? Do you mean approximate joins as in this talk? http://www2.research.att.com/~divesh/papers/ks2005-aj-tutori...

[joaojeronimo]

#FoundationDB

[sql2]

Goood~