Pythian Blog

I feel like I need to note the pricing. $0.01 per 1,000 queries. That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Let's say you make 1,000/sec. $0.01 * 60 seconds in a minute * 60 minutes in an hour * 24 hours in a day * 30 days in a month = $25,920.

Is that a lot? I think it is. Google Cloud Spanner costs $0.90/hour per node or around $650/mo. Each Cloud Spanner node can do around 10,000 queries per second[1]. So, $650 to Google gets you 10x the queries that $25,920 to Fauna gets you. I mean, for $25,920, you could get a Spanner cluster with 40 servers. Each of those servers would only have to handle 25 queries per second to get you 1,000 queries per second.

I'm sure that people are going to question whether FaunaDB can actually do what it claims. At this pricing, I can't imagine someone actually seeing if they can live up to their claims. They have a graph showing linear scaling to 2M reads per second. Based on their pricing, that would be $630M per year. For comparison, Snapchat committed to spending $400M per year on Google Cloud and another $100M on AWS (and people thought the spend was outrageous even for a company valued at tens of billions of dollars). This is more money for the database alone.

Heck, it looks like one can get 5-20k queries per second out of Google's Cloud SQL MySQL on a highmem-16 costing $1k/mo[2]. That would cost $130k-$500k on FaunaDB. It seems like the pricing of FaunaDB is off by a couple orders of magnitude.

Ultimately,…

I'm on SL and I also depend on Oracle 10g, so thanks for the note on the Seg Fault, that would be showstopper moving to Lion.

Now, I get the ulimit error on SL too, that's just that your "oracle" user is not authorized to set ulimit that high (it's in your oracle ~/.bashrc). You probably followed the installation instructions from Pythian (http://www.pythian.com/news/1937/quick-install-guide-for-oracle-10g-release-2-on-mac-os-x-leopard-intel/), just like I did. If you didn't get that error before, maybe the Lion installation has reset the max processes limit.

Here's how to check the current value:

ojosilva@snow:~$ sysctl kern.maxprocperuid
kern.maxprocperuid: 266

Change it like this (so it matches the ulimit -Su and -Hu values in oracle's .bashrc):

sudo sysctl -w kern.maxprocperuid=512

Maybe that will cure your segfault. Read thru the Pythian page and recheck all your sysctl parameters. Let me know how it goes.

I'm not saying that you wouldn't see any performance gain. 2TB on the outer track will be faster than 8TBs on the same 8TB disk, but I'm saying any gains will be lost due the dense nature of the drives.

A quick google search shows that there are marginal gains on the outer track vs the inner, but that is only on sequential workloads. For something like GitLab, the workloads would be anything but.

http://superuser.com/questions/643013/are-partitions-to-the-inner-outer-edge-significantly-faster

https://www.pythian.com/blog/hard-drive-inner-or-outer/

I am still trying to push, pull or twist my concept of an ultralow-power mcu that runs 14.4MHz (or at nearly 14mA drain, 32MHz) in order to have it not only perform its optimal max of 1 I/O per cycle but do a simultaneous random read and write. Values are 1kb and keys 16 bytes, though... (As opposed to using the 1000 Amazon vCPUs each ~1.0 Xeon core with 4 hyperthreads (see http://www.pythian.com/blog/virtual-cpus-with-amazon-web-services/ )) That would be a pretty fat memory model (or HMC controller) for a micro...

Not exactly a startup (but less than 100 employees), but the company I work for is hiring sysadmins (both internal and as consultants for remote work). We are taking H-1B candidates and I'd love to stop being the only H-1B employee in the company :)

We are also looking for DBAs: Oracle, MySQL and even SQL-Server.

You can read my blog post about my experience with the company: http://www.pythian.com/news/16887/learning-on-the-job-some-thoughts-from-mots/

And apply here: http://candidates.pythian.com/