We are building a system that will need to serve loads of small requests from day one. By "loads" I mean ~5,000 queries per second. For each query we need to retrieve ~20 records from noSQL database. There will be two batch reads - 3-4 records at first and then 16-17 reads instantly after that (based on the result of first read). That would be ~100,000 objects to read per second.
Until now we were thinking about using DynamoDB for this as it's really easy to start with.
Storage is not something I would be worried about as the objects will be really tiny.
What I am worried about is cost of reads. DynamoDB costs $0.0113 per hour per 100 eventually consistent (which is fine for us) reads per second. That is $11,3 per hour for us provided that all objects are up to 1KB in size. And that would be $5424 per month based on 16 hours/day average usage.
So... $5424 per month.
I would consider other options but I am worried about maintenance issues, costs etc. I have never worked with such setups before so your advice would be really valuable.
What would be the most cost-effective (yet still hassle-free) solution for such read/write intensive application?
From your description above, I'm assuming that your 5,000 queries per second are entirely read operations. This is essentially what we'd call a data warehouse use case. What are your availability requirements? Does it have to be hosted on AWS and friends, or can you buy your own hardware to run in-house? What does your data look like? What does the logic which consumes this data look like?
You might get the sense that there really isn't enough information here to answer the question definitively, but I can at least offer some advice.
First, if your data is relatively small and your queries are simple, save yourself some hassle and make sure you're querying from RAM instead of disk. Any modern RDBMS with support for in-memory caching/tablespaces will do the trick. Postgres and MySQL both have features for this. In the case of Postgres make sure you've tuned the memory parameters appropriately as the out-of-the-box configuration is designed to run on pretty meager hardware. If you must use a NoSQL option, depending on the structure of your data Redis is probably a good choice (it's also primarily in-memory). However in order to say which flavor of NoSQL might be the best fit we'd need to know more about the structure of the data that you're querying, and what queries you're running.
If the queries boil down to SELECT * FROM table WHERE primary_key = {CONSTANT} - don't bother messing with NoSQL - just use an RDBMS and learn how to tune the dang thing. This is doubly true if you can run it on your own hardware. If the connection count is high, use read slaves to balance the load.
Long-after-the-fact Edit (5/7/2013):
Something I should've mentioned before: EC2 is a really really crappy place to measure performance of self-managed database nodes. Unless you're paying out the nose, your I/O perf will be terrible. Your choices are to either pay big money for provisioned IOPS, RAID together a bunch of EBS volumes, or rely on ephemeral storage whilst syncing a WAL off to S3 or similar. All of these options are expensive and difficult to maintain. All of these options have varying degrees of performance.
I discovered this for a recent project, so I switched to Rackspace. The performance increased tremendously there, but I noticed that I was paying a lot for CPU and RAM resources when really I just need fast I/O. Now I host with Digital Ocean. All of DO's storage is SSD. Their CPU performance is kind of crappy in comparison to other offerings, but I'm incredibly I/O bound so I Just Don't Care. After dropping Postgres' random_page_cost to 2, I'm humming along quite nicely.
Moral of the story: profile, tune, repeat. Ask yourself what-if questions and constantly validate your assumptions.
Another long-after-the-fact-edit (11/23/2013): As an example of what I'm describing here, check out the following article for an example of using MySQL 5.7 with the InnoDB memcached plugin to achieve 1M QPS: http://dimitrik.free.fr/blog/archives/11-01-2013_11-30-2013.html#2013-11-22
By "loads" I mean ~5,000 queries per second.
Ah that's not so much, even SQL can handle that. So you are already easily within the limits of what most modern DBs can handle. However they can only handle this with the right:
Indexes
Queries
Server Hardware
Splitting of large data (you might require a large amount of shards with relatively low data each, dependant here so I said "might")
That would be ~100,000 objects to read per second.
Now that's more of a high load scenario. Must you read these in such a fragmented manner? If so then (as I said) you may require to look into spreading the load across replicated shards.
Storage is not something I would be worried about as the objects will be really tiny.
Mongo is aggresive with disk allocation so even with small objects it will still pre-allocate a lot of space, this is something to bare in mind.
So... $5424 per month.
Oh yea the billing thrills of Amazon :\.
I would consider other options but I am worried about maintenance issues, costs etc. I have never worked with such setups before so your advice would be really valuable.
Now you hit the snag of it all. You can setup your own cluster but then you might end up paying that much in money and time (or way more) for the servers, people, admins and your own mantenance time. This is one reason why DynamoDB really shines here. For large setups who are looking to take the load and pain and stress of server management (trust me it is really painful, if your a Dev you might as well change your job title to server admin from now on) off of the company.
Considering to setup this yourself you would need:
A considerable amount of EC instances (dependant upon data and index size but I would say close to maybe 30?)
A server admin (maybe 2, maybe freelance?)
Both of which could set you back 100's of thousands of pounds a year, I would personally bet for the managed approach if it fits your needs and budget. When your need grows beyond what managed Amazon DB can give you then move to your infrastructure.
Edit
I should amend that the cost effectiveness was done with quite a few black holes for example:
I am unsure of the amount of data you have
I am unsure of writes
Both of these contribute me to place a scenario of:
Massive writes (about as much as your reading)
Massive data (lots)
Here is what I recommend in sequence.
Identify your use case and choose the correct db. We test MySQL and MongoDb regularly for all kinds of workloads (OLTP, Analytics, etc). In all cases we have tested with, MySQL outperforms MongoDb and is cheaper ($/TPS) compared to MongoDb. MongoDb has other advantages but that is another story ... since we are talking about performance here.
Try to cache your queries in RAM (by provisioning adequate RAM).
If you are bottle necked on RAM, then you can try a SSD caching solution which takes advantage of ephemeral SSD. This works if your workload is cache friendly. You can save loads of money as ephemeral SSD is typically not charged by the cloud provider.
Try PIOPS/RAID or a combination to create adequate IOPS for your application.
Related
I am working on an application, where we are writing lots and lots of key value pairs. On production the database size will run into hundreds of Terabytes, even multiple Petabytes. The keys are 20 bytes and the value is maximum 128 KB, and very rarely smaller than 4 KB. Right now we are using MongoDB. The performance is not very good, because obviously there is a lot of overhead going on here. MongoDB writes to the file system, which writes to the LVM, which further writes to a RAID 6 array.
Since our requirement is very basic, I think using a general purpose database system is hitting the performance. I was thinking of implementing a simple database system, where we could put the documents (or 'values') directly to the raw drive (actually the RAID array), and store the keys (and a pointer to where the value lives on the raw drive) in a fast in-memory database backed by an SSD. This will also speed-up the reads, as all there would not be no fragmentation (as opposed to using a filesystem.)
Although a document is rarely deleted, we would still have to maintain a pool of free space available on the device (something that the filesystem would have provided).
My question is, will this really provide any significant improvements? Also, are there any document storage systems that do something like this? Or anything similar, that we can use as a starting poing?
Apache Cassandra jumps to mind. It's the current elect NoSQL solution where massive scaling is concerned. It sees production usage at several large companies with massive scaling requirements. Having worked a little with it, I can say that it requires a little bit of time to rethink your data model to fit how it arranges its storage engine. The famously citied article "WTF is a supercolumn" gives a sound introduction to this. Caveat: Cassandra really only makes sense when you plan on storing huge datasets and distribution with no single point of failure is a mission critical requirement. With the way you've explained your data, it sounds like a fit.
Also, have you looked into redis at all, at least for saving key references? Your memory requirements far outstrip what a single instance would be able to handle but Redis can also be configured to shard. It isn't its primary use case but it sees production use at both Craigslist and Groupon
Also, have you done everything possible to optimize mongo, especially investigating how you could improve indexing? Mongo does save out to disk, but should be relatively performant when optimized to keep the hottest portion of the set in memory if able.
Is it possible to cache this data if its not too transient?
I would totally caution you against rolling your own with this. Just a fair warning. That's not a knock at you or anyone else, its just that I've personally had to maintain custom "data indexes" written by in house developers who got in way over their heads before. At my job we have a massive on disk key-value store that is a major performance bottleneck in our system that was written by a developer who has since separated from the company. It's frustrating to be stuck such a solution among the exciting NoSQL opportunities of today. Projects like the ones I cited above take advantage of the whole strength of the open source community to proof and optimize their use. That isn't something you will be able to attain working on your own solution unless you make a massive investment of time, effort and promotion. At the very least I'd encourage you to look at all your nosql options and maybe find a project you can contribute to rather than rolling your own. Writing a database server itself is definitely a nontrivial task that needs a huge team, especially with the requirements you've given (but should you end up doing so, I wish you luck! =) )
Late answer, but for future reference I think Spider does this
First of all, I apologize for my potentially shallow understanding of NoSQL architecture (and databases in general) so try to bear with me.
I'm thinking of using mongoDB to store resources associated with an UUID. The resources can be things such as large image files (tens of megabytes) so it makes sense to store them as files and store just links in my database along with the associated metadata. There's also the added flexibility of decoupling the actual location of the resource files, so I can use a different third party to store the files if I need to.
Now, one document which describes resources would be about 1kB. At first I except a couple hundred thousands of resource documents which would equal some hundreds of megabytes in database size, easily fitting into server memory. But in the future I might have to scale this into the order of tens of MILLIONS of documents. This would be tens of gigabytes which I can't squeeze into server memory anymore.
Only the index could still fit in memory being around a gigabyte or two. But if I understand correctly, I'd have to read from disk every time I did a lookup on an UUID. Is there a substantial speed benefit from mongoDB over a traditional relational database in such a situation?
BONUS QUESTION: is there an existing, established way of doing what I'm trying to achieve? :)
MongoDB doesn't suddenly become slow the second the entire database no longer fits into physical memory. MongoDB currently uses a storage engine based on memory mapped files. This means data that is accessed often will usually be in memory (OS managed, but assume a LRU scheme or something similar).
As such it may not slow down at all at that point or only slightly, it really depends on your data access patterns. Similar story with indexes, if you (right) balance your index appropriately and if your use case allows it you can have a huge index with only a fraction of it in physical memory and still have very decent performance with the majority of index hits happening in physical memory.
Because you're talking about UUID's this might all be a bit hard to achieve since there's no guarantee that the same limited group of users are generating the vast majority of throughput. In those cases sharding really is the most appropriate way to maintain quality of service.
This would be tens of gigabytes which I can't squeeze into server
memory anymore.
That's why MongoDB gives you sharding to partition your data across multiple mongod instances (or replica sets).
In addition to considering sharding, or maybe even before, you should also try to use covered indexes as much as possible, especially if it fits your Use cases.
This way you do not HAVE to load entire documents into memory. Your indexes can help out.
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Retrieving+a+Subset+of+Fields#RetrievingaSubsetofFields-CoveredIndexes
If you have to display your entire document all the time based on the id, then the general rule of thumb is to attempt to keep e working set in memory.
http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/12/13/mongodb-monitoring-keep-in-it-ram/
This is one of the resources that talks about that. There is a video on mongodb's site too that speaks about this.
By attempting to size the ram so that the working set is in memory, and also looking at sharding, you will not have to do this right away, you can always add sharding later. This will improve scalability of your app over time.
Again, these are not absolute statements, these are general guidelines, that you should think through your usage patterns and make sure that they ar relevant to what you are doing.
Personally, I have not had the need to fit everything in ram.
I'm looking at NoSQL for extremely high volumes of data. We're storing cached versions of web page text in MySQL at the moment, but it seems like the database will get huge very quickly.
My requirements are:
Durability, must not lose data on flushes/writes
Very fast read, reasonably fast write
Fully consistent replication
Preferably, in-memory plus an eventual disk write
I'm looking at: MongoDB, Redis, Raik, and Cassandra right now.
Which best fits my requirements?
I have experience with Redis and MongoDB, but would not recommend either for your use case. Redis is awesome in every regard, but since it's RAM-only and has no clustering features (yet, they are in development), it doesn't scale very well. MongoDB I wouldn't ever use again for anything that needs anything but a small replica set.
Basically, MongoDB is immature and completely unsuitable for any kind of high volume, high performance requirements. It has a global write lock which is held during disk flushes, which means that performance can vary wildly depending on what you do. In practice it makes updates that grow documents impossible, and you need to be very careful with deletes, too. Speaking of deletes, they fragment the database severely, so if you do a lot of deletes your performance is going to suffer.
Sharding in 1.8.0 through 1.8.1 was a disaster. There were complete show stopper bugs that should never have made it into a stable release. Configuration wasn't flushed properly and it was very easy to get your database into a bad state so that chunks never moved off of the primary shard. 1.8.2 solves most of them and seems more stable, but I don't trust the sharding implementation one bit. Add to this that sharding is hard even when everything works, it's not always easy to select a natural shard key, and if you don't sharding will cause you much grief.
MongoDB is really easy to work with and the feature set is really nice. The documentation, the drivers and the community are all great. MongoDB works super as a replacement for MySQL, but don't use it for anything that needs to scale out.
We're currently looking at moving to Cassandra. I find the dynamo model (e.g. no master nodes; write and read anywhere; simply add nodes to grow the cluster) compelling and the features are more or less right for us. The data model is schema less just like MongoDB, although a little more limited (you can choose between one or two level hashes, basically). I'm sure the community is good once you get into it, but so far I find it hard to find good information on how to solve common problems, and the documentation is lacking. Most of the information you find on blogs is a year old, and a lot of things have happened since then (0.7 and 0.8 seem to be really significant updates both, but most things you find are about 0.6). The drivers are also not very mature or well documented, from what I've seen so far, and everyone seems to be squabbling about whether Thrift, Avro or CQL is what should be used (and that has changed from 0.6 to 0.7 to 0.8).
Riak is interesting, for the same reasons as Cassandra, but for us a pure key-value-store is not enough, we need to be able to update without first doing a read. With Riak this isn't possible since the values are just blobs. This sounds like it wouldn't be an issue for you though.
HBase is another contender. It seems like a pain to set up and run because of the many different pieces, ZooKeeper, HDFS, etc. But the data model is similar to Cassandra (columnar, i.e. one level hashes), which works well for us, but may not be important for you. It seems tried and true, but as with MongoDB you have to watch out for sharding issues, you must put some thought into your keys or you get into trouble.
There is also CouchDB, Project Voldemort and countless other possible choices. I think that if you are serious about "extremely high volumes of data" then it's between Cassandra, Riak and HBase. Strike Riak if pure key-value-storage isn't enough. Depending on what you mean by "fully consistent replication" then Cassandra and Riak are out, because there is a possibility (not necessarily big, and tunable) of reading a stale value.
In the end you obviously have to try it out on your particular use case, so all you really should take home from this answer is: don't bother with MongoDB.
Store the cached versions in MemCache instead of MySQL. It will eliminate most writes. Writing to MySQL is bad, because it kills the query cache. When you cache the pages in MemCache, you will have far less writes to the database, and you'll have less reading pressure too. You can cache the result of complex queries, or cache entire pages as you like.
Maybe it won't be as fast as Cassandra, but it will give you an enormous boost compared to your current situation with only MySQL. And you won't have to rewrite your entire application.
memcachedb - memcached protocol, BDB storage, replication etc
Handlersocket - MySql InnoDB plugin.
Oracle memcached InnoDB plugin
RavenDB can store up to 16TB of data per node, and you can have several nodes per machine acting as one database using its built-in sharding support. Thats as huge as it gets.
Durability, fastness, replication is all there, and running in memory is supported too (but not recommended if you want to scale to 16TB per node).
For extremely high volume data, it's clear that Cassandra and hadoop/hbase are far superior than all others for this task. Cassandra proved itself on large clusters like 400 nodes. rdms dbs cannot scale easily, also mongo has some problems when node counts start to increase http://www.nosqlbenchmarking.com/2011/05/paper-on-elasticity-and-scalability-for-acm-socc-2011/
Serdar
I'm building a system that tracks and verifies ad impressions and clicks. This means that there are a lot of insert commands (about 90/second average, peaking at 250) and some read operations, but the focus is on performance and making it blazing-fast.
The system is currently on MongoDB, but I've been introduced to Cassandra and Redis since then. Would it be a good idea to go to one of these two solutions, rather than stay on MongoDB? Why or why not?
Thank you
For a harvesting solution like this, I would recommend a multi-stage approach. Redis is good at real time communication. Redis is designed as an in-memory key/value store and inherits some very nice benefits of being a memory database: O(1) list operations. For as long as there is RAM to use on a server, Redis will not slow down pushing to the end of your lists which is good when you need to insert items at such an extreme rate. Unfortunately, Redis can't operate with data sets larger than the amount of RAM you have (it only writes to disk, reading is for restarting the server or in case of a system crash) and scaling has to be done by you and your application. (A common way is to spread keys across numerous servers, which is implemented by some Redis drivers especially those for Ruby on Rails.) Redis also has support for simple publish/subscribe messenging, which can be useful at times as well.
In this scenario, Redis is "stage one." For each specific type of event you create a list in Redis with a unique name; for example we have "page viewed" and "link clicked." For simplicity we want to make sure the data in each list is the same structure; link clicked may have a user token, link name and URL, while the page viewed may only have the user token and URL. Your first concern is just getting the fact it happened and whatever absolutely neccesary data you need is pushed.
Next we have some simple processing workers that take this frantically inserted information off of Redis' hands, by asking it to take an item off the end of the list and hand it over. The worker can make any adjustments/deduplication/ID lookups needed to properly file the data and hand it off to a more permanent storage site. Fire up as many of these workers as you need to keep Redis' memory load bearable. You could write the workers in anything you wish (Node.js, C#, Java, ...) as long as it has a Redis driver (most web languages do now) and one for your desired storage (SQL, Mongo, etc.)
MongoDB is good at document storage. Unlike Redis it is able to deal with databases larger than RAM and it supports sharding/replication on it's own. An advantage of MongoDB over SQL-based options is that you don't have to have a predetermined schema, you're free to change the way data is stored however you want at any time.
I would, however, suggest Redis or Mongo for the "step one" phase of holding data for processing and use a traditional SQL setup (Postgres or MSSQL, perhaps) to store post-processed data. Tracking client behavior sounds like relational data to me, since you may want to go "Show me everyone who views this page" or "How many pages did this person view on this given day" or "What day had the most viewers in total?". There may be even more complex joins or queries for analytic purposes you come up with, and mature SQL solutions can do a lot of this filtering for you; NoSQL (Mongo or Redis specifically) can't do joins or complex queries across varied sets of data.
I currently work for a very large ad network and we write to flat files :)
I'm personally a Mongo fan, but frankly, Redis and Cassandra are unlikely to perform either better or worse. I mean, all you're doing is throwing stuff into memory and then flushing to disk in the background (both Mongo and Redis do this).
If you're looking for blazing fast speed, the other option is to keep several impressions in local memory and then flush them disk every minute or so. Of course, this is basically what Mongo and Redis do for you. Not a real compelling reason to move.
All three solutions (four if you count flat-files) will give you blazing fast writes. The non-relational (nosql) solutions will give you tunable fault-tolerance as well for the purposes of disaster recovery.
In terms of scale, our test environment, with only three MongoDB nodes, can handle 2-3k mixed transactions per second. At 8 nodes, we can handle 12k-15k mixed transactions per second. Cassandra can scale even higher. 250 reads is (or should be) no problem.
The more important question is, what do you want to do with this data? Operational reporting? Time-series analysis? Ad-hoc pattern analysis? real-time reporting?
MongoDB is a good option if you want the ability to do ad-hoc analysis based on multiple attributes within a collection. You can put up to 40 indexes on a collection, though the indexes will be stored in-memory, so watch for size. But the result is a flexible analytical solution.
Cassandra is a key-value store. You define a static column or set of columns that will act as your primary index right up front. All queries run against Cassandra should be tuned to this index. You can put a secondary on it, but that's about as far as it goes. You can, of course, use MapReduce to scan the store for non-key attribution, but it will be just that: a serial scan through the store. Cassandra also doesn't have the notion of "like" or regex operations on the server nodes. If you want to find all customers where the first name starts with "Alex", you'll have to scan through the entire collection, pull the first name out for each entry and run it through a client-side regex.
I'm not familiar enough with Redis to speak intelligently about it. Sorry.
If you are evaluating non-relational platforms, you might also want to consider CouchDB and Riak.
Hope this helps.
Just found this: http://blog.axant.it/archives/236
Quoting the most interesting part:
This second graph is about Redis RPUSH vs Mongo $PUSH vs Mongo insert, and I find this graph to be really interesting. Up to 5000 entries mongodb $push is faster even when compared to Redis RPUSH, then it becames incredibly slow, probably the mongodb array type has linear insertion time and so it becomes slower and slower. mongodb might gain a bit of performances by exposing a constant time insertion list type, but even with the linear time array type (which can guarantee constant time look-up) it has its applications for small sets of data.
I guess everything depends at least on data type and volume. Best advice probably would be to benchmark on your typical dataset and see yourself.
According to the Benchmarking Top NoSQL Databases (download here)
I recommend Cassandra.
If you have the choice (and need to move away from flat fies) I would go with Redis. Its blazingly fast, will comfortably handle the load you're talking about, but more importantly you won't have to manage the flushing/IO code. I understand its pretty straight forward but less code to manage is better than more.
You will also get horizontal scaling options with Redis that you may not get with file based caching.
I can get around 30k inserts/sec with MongoDB on a simple $350 Dell. If you only need around 2k inserts/sec, I would stick with MongoDB and shard it for scalability. Maybe also look into doing something with Node.js or something similar to make things more asynchronous.
The problem with inserts into databases is that they usually require writing to a random block on disk for each insert. What you want is something that only writes to disk every 10 inserts or so, ideally to sequential blocks.
Flat files are good. Summary statistics (eg total hits per page) can be obtained from flat files in a scalable manner using merge-sorty map-reducy type algorithms. It's not too hard to roll your own.
SQLite now supports Write Ahead Logging, which may also provide adequate performance.
I have hand-on experience with mongodb, couchdb and cassandra. I converted a lot of files to base64 string and insert these string into nosql.
mongodb is the fastest. cassandra is slowest. couchdb is slow too.
I think mysql would be much faster than all of them, but I didn't try mysql for my test case yet.
Object databases like MongoDB and db4o are getting lots of publicity lately. Everyone that plays with them seems to love it. I'm guessing that they are dealing with about 640K of data in their sample apps.
Has anyone tried to use an object database with a large amount of data (say, 50GB or more)? Are you able to still execute complex queries against it (like from a search screen)? How does it compare to your usual relational database of choice?
I'm just curious. I want to take the object database plunge, but I need to know if it'll work on something more than a sample app.
Someone just went into production with a 12 terabytes of data in MongoDB. The largest I knew of before that was 1 TB. Lots of people are keeping really large amounts of data in Mongo.
It's important to remember that Mongo works a lot like a relational database: you need the right indexes to get good performance. You can use explain() on queries and contact the user list for help with this.
When I started db4o back in 2000 I didn't have huge databases in mind. The key goal was to store any complex object very simply with one line of code and to do that good and fast with low ressource consumption, so it can run embedded and on mobile devices.
Over time we had many users that used db4o for webapps and with quite large amounts of data, going close to todays maximum database file size of 256GB (with a configured block size of 127 bytes). So to answer your question: Yes, db4o will work with 50GB, but you shouldn't plan to use it for terabytes of data (unless you can nicely split your data over multiple db4o databases, the setup costs for a single database are negligible, you can just call #openFile() )
db4o was acquired by Versant in 2008, because it's capabilites (embedded, low ressource-consumption, lightweight) make it a great complimentary product to Versant's high-end object database VOD. VOD scales for huge amounts of data and it does so much better than relational databases. I think it will merely chuckle over 50GB.
MongoDB powers SourceForge, The New York Times, and several other large databases...
You should read the MongoDB use cases. People who are just playing with technology are often just looking at how does this work and are not at the point where they can understand the limitations. For the right sorts of datasets and access patterns 50GB is nothing for MongoDB running on the right hardware.
These non-relational systems look at the trade-offs which RDBMs made, and changed them a bit. Consistency is not as important as other things in some situations so these solutions let you trade that off for something else. The trade-off is still relatively minor ms or maybe secs in some situations.
It is worth reading about the CAP theorem too.
I was looking at moving the API I have for sure with the stack overflow iphone app I wrote a while back to MongoDB from where it currently sits in a MySQL database. In raw form the SO CC dump is in the multi-gigabyte range and the way I constructed the documents for MongoDB resulted in a 10G+ database. It is arguable that I didn't construct the documents well but I didn't want to spend a ton of time doing this.
One of the very first things you will run into if you start down this path is the lack of 32 bit support. Of course everything is moving to 64 bit now but just something to keep in mind. I don't think any of the major document databases support paging in 32 bit mode and that is understandable from a code complexity standpoint.
To test what I wanted to do I used a 64 bit instance EC2 node. The second thing I ran into is that even though this machine had 7G of memory when the physical memory was exhausted things went from fast to not so fast. I'm not sure I didn't have something set up incorrectly at this point because the non-support of 32 bit system killed what I wanted to use it for but I still wanted to see what it looked like. Loading the same data dump into MySQL takes about 2 minutes on a much less powerful box but the script I used to load the two database works differently so I can't make a good comparison. Running only a subset of the data into MongoDB was much faster as long as it resulted in a database that was less than 7G.
I think my take away from it was that large databases will work just fine but you may have to think about how the data is structured more than you would with a traditional database if you want to maintain the high performance. I see a lot of people using MongoDB for logging and I can imagine that a lot of those databases are massive but at the same time they may not be doing a lot of random access so that may mask what performance would look like for more traditional applications.
A recent resource that might be helpful is the visual guide to nosql systems. There are a decent number of choices outside of MongoDB. I have used Redis as well although not with as large of a database.
Here's some benchmarks on db4o:
http://www.db4o.com/about/productinformation/benchmarks/
I think it ultimately depends on a lot of factors, including the complexity of the data, but db4o seems to certainly hang with the best of them.
Perhaps worth a mention.
The European Space Agency's Planck mission is running on the Versant Object Database.
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=46951
It is a satelite with 74 onboard sensors launched last year which is mapping the infrarred spectrum of the universe and storing the information in a map segment model. It has been getting a ton of hype these days because of it's producing some of the coolest images ever seen of the universe.
Anyway, it has generated 25T of information stored in Versant and replicated across 3 continents. When the mission is complete next year, it will be a total of 50T
Probably also worth noting, object databases tend to be a lot smaller to hold the same information. It is because they are truly normalized, no data duplication for joins, no empty wasted column space and few indexes rather than 100's of them. You can find public information about testing ESA did to consider storage in multi-column relational database format -vs- using a proper object model and storing in the Versant object database. THey found they could save 75% disk space by using Versant.
Here is the implementation:
http://www.planck.fr/Piodoc/PIOlib_Overview_V1.0.pdf
Here they talk about 3T -vs- 12T found in the testing
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2008/12/10/cosmic-data/
Also ... there are benchmarks which show Versant orders of magnitude faster on the analysis side of the mission.
CHeers,
-Robert