July 18, 2012

Clustrix 4.0 and other Clustrix stuff

It feels like time to write about Clustrix, which I last covered in detail in May, 2010, and which is releasing Clustrix 4.0 today. Clustrix and Clustrix 4.0 basics include:

The biggest Clustrix installation seems to be 20 nodes or so. Others seem to have 10+. I presume those disaster recovery customers have 6 or more nodes each. I’m not quite sure how the arithmetic on that all works; perhaps the 125ish count of nodes is a bit low.

Clustrix technical notes include:

Clustrix doesn’t have compression, with the usual excuse of excessive CPU cost. When I pointed out that dictionary/token compression is cheap, Clustrix cofounder/CTO Sergei Tsarev suggested that it doesn’t make sense now due to high cardinalities in OLTP workloads, but could become more important as more analytic use cases emerge.

Clustrix’ JSON story seems to be:

That sounds a lot like other schemes for sticking documents into relational BLOBs/CLOBs (Binary/Character Large OBjects), although it happens to be the first time I’ve heard it in connection with JSON.

Clustrix has one cool idea I haven’t heard from anybody else, which I’m calling index distribution. The idea is that each index can be distributed differently across the cluster (this includes the JSON secondary indexes), i.e. on different distribution keys. Clustrix thinks that paying special attention to index distribution and movement is helpful to the performance of distributed joins.

I still wish Clustrix were available on a software-only/bring your own hardware/bring your own cloud basis. Absent that, pricing and lock-in are concerns. True, I didn’t immediately see any flaws in Clustrix’ claims that its Rackspace offering was at once cheaper and more performant than MySQL on Amazon; but then, Amazon isn’t always that cost-effective an option. Price aside, Clustrix does sound as if it’s one of a number of appealing NewSQL options, and probably even one of the (relatively speaking) more proven ones.

Comments

4 Responses to “Clustrix 4.0 and other Clustrix stuff”

  1. Clustrix 4.0 Review – Leigh Anne Varney's Blog on August 10th, 2012 12:23 pm

    […] Read the article in DBMS2 […]

  2. NewSQL thoughts | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on January 6th, 2013 6:54 am

    […] vendors I’ve written about in the past include Akiban, Tokutek, CodeFutures (dbShards), Clustrix, Schooner (Membrain), VoltDB, ScaleBase, and ScaleDB, with GenieDB and NuoDB coming […]

  3. A data distribution idea at Vertica and Clustrix | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on May 3rd, 2013 3:37 pm

    […] Yesterday I wrote: Clustrix has one cool idea I haven’t heard from anybody else, which I’m calling index distribution. The idea is that each index can be distributed differently across the cluster …  i.e. on different distribution keys. Clustrix thinks that paying special attention to index distribution and movement is helpful to the performance of distributed joins. […]

  4. Christine Lieu on November 22nd, 2013 1:17 pm

    “I still wish Clustrix were available on a software-only/bring your own hardware/bring your own cloud basis”

    Your wish has come true! http://www.clustrix.com/get-software

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