Comments on: Hindsight on a scalable replacement for InnoDB

By: Mike Stevens

Mike Stevens — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:45:09 +0000

If innoDB isn’t using a separate process for row data commits then Falcon will be faster because it won’t have to wait for all data to commit to disk – a very slow process. Of course I don’t see why innoDB couldn’t do the same.

By: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:13:17 +0000

I doubt that Falcon provides for faster commit speeds. Innodb uses a WAL. Commit only requires that entries are written to the transaction log on disk.

By: Antony Curtis

Antony Curtis — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:11:18 +0000

in a nutshell, the use case for which Falcon is targeting is for large numbers of small transactions, where typically with Innodb, the bottleneck would be the commit queue where committed transactions must have all row updates written to disk.

Falcon is different insofar as a transaction is considered committed when the commit log entry is written to disk and the in-memory record data is committed. It will lazily update the disk version of the row data safely in separate worker threads.

Theoretically, the design tries to provide a trade-off between the traditional random-access engines such as InnoDB and compliment it with fast commit speeds as in log-structured engines by taking advantage of plentiful RAM.

Of course, for a more accurate and complete description of Falcon, you’d have to ask the Falcon Team, Ann Harrison or Jim Starkey.

By: Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:59:08 +0000

I would also like to know what it will do to improve on InnoDB. An ETA for when it will do this would also be good. That it has a different implementation than InnoDB is not interesting to me.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:34:50 +0000

Yeah, I haven’t talked to any of the Falcon team for a while, and of course it’s not like I’m close friends with any of them — so I don’t mean to sound like I’m the authority on it. I have just never understood what’s going on with the project, or what options are really viable for it. I probably shouldn’t spend much time thinking about any of this until the acquisition deal stabilizes a little anyway.

If someone who knows wants to write a brief and frank assessment of what really differentiates Falcon and what needs it will really fill, without any marketing pitch or fluff, I would find it very helpful.