Re: VoltDB

Right, the syntax is tortuous. As for its Java... academically sound but
Perl or Python would be a lot better.

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Peter Headland <Peter(at)matrixlink(dot)com>wrote:

> On 2010-05-26 18:27, Jon Asher wrote:
>
> Well it's an in-memory db so it's fast. Big surprise. Think of memcache
> for the cloud with SQL support.
>
>
> My "perpetual motion" snark was aimed at the way the web site implies that
> you get all the wonderfulness without giving up anything. The web site is
> actually surprisingly coy about exactly how it works unless you "register",
> and the whole thing has been deliberately shrouded in mystery from it's
> inception. (Epic fail - NEVER make people who might want your product
> "register" before they are allowed to know any details of it!)
>
> I am not saying that H-store/VoltDB is a bad product or bad concept within
> its niche; I am just very unimpressed by the way the web site appears to
> engage in the sleazy overselling techniques of big corporations. That is a
> pattern that seems to have evolved as the project became more visible over
> the past year or so. I smell a weasel at work! :-)
>
> Some more thorough searching elsewhere reveals that this is far from a
> general-purpose RDBMS, and even the SQL support is hedged about with rather
> draconian limitations and caveats (you weren't expecting to be able to issue
> SQL queries via JDBC, were you?) I'd go so far as to say that the SQL
> support might be more about marketing than it is about utility, since all db
> access has to be via specially structured Java classes anyhow.
>
> In short, if you can fit your application into its rather narrow
> world-view, it can be spectacularly fast, but if your application evolves in
> the "wrong"direction, most of the benefits will likely evaporate.
> Personally, I don't like laying myself open to catastrophic performance
> degradations and/or inability to deliver when my users' requirements change
> unexpectedly - I'd rather it was slow to begin with than blazing fast for a
> year, then slow, because the latter gets you fired at the end of the year.
> That said, there are some very successful applications that use non-RDBMS
> environments that have the same characteristic, and people have managed to
> make those work (and retain their jobs).
>
> --
> Peter Headland
>
>