Monday, December 9, 2019

Still web scale

I am excited to start a new job next week working on performance at MongoDB. I have been a fan of the people and product for years and I look forward to contributing from the inside. The reasons I have been a fan include the rate at which the product has improved, WiredTiger and their contribution to MongoRocks.

I look forward to learning the modern performance analysis tool chain courtesy of Brendan Gregg. His BPF book should be ready soon and there is much content on his web site. When I had to understand off-cpu stalls from IO and mutex contention there wasn't much available 10 years ago, thus PMP was born. While it served me well it is time to move on.

I will continue to blog including performance comparisons between database engines. I look forward to writing about MongoDB, especially WiredTiger internals, but I will exclude MongoDB from the performance comparisons on my blog.

I left FB in January and spent most of the year reading applied math books and being a caregiver. I appreciate the opportunity I had there and the people who helped me -- both managers and many awesome technical contributors. I wouldn't have made it here without Domas.

FB asked one trick question in my job interview -- do I want to be hands on or an architect. I gave the correct answer -- hands on. Small & fast-growing companies need people who are hands-on. More architects will be needed post-IPO when the company gets larger. I interviewed at FB because the MySQL team at Google was ended and I had to find a new project. That was a source of stress but it turned out OK as MySQL at FB was my new project.

MyRocks and RocksDB have been in capable hands for a long time, so I expect more good things from those teams.

The MySQL community has been wonderful to me. My career wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of so many people who made MySQL better. Fortunately, clever people arrive to replace the people who leave and MySQL will continue to improve. Perhaps one day upstream will get a write-optimized storage engine. Dare to dream.

5 comments:

  1. Genuine question, not a snark. Would you consider NDB to be write optimized, or are you referring more to an LSM-based engine?

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    1. I limit myself to databases for which the working set doesn't have to fit in memory. While NDB lets some data be spilled to disk, most has to be in RAM. I think it is awesome, but ignore it given my constraints.

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  2. Congratulations!
    WiredTiger is impressive at performance, and MongoDB is a native scalable database. That's a lot of opportunities at the intersection of scale-up and scale-out. We are hoping for your future awesome work!

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  3. Hi. Mark. Initial MongoRocks 4.0 has been implemented recently by https://github.com/mongodb-partners/mongo-rocks . Would you consider paying attention to and evaluating this though MongoRocks is still not scheduled by MongoDB.

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    1. I hope to do that. My home test cluster has been busy so it might be a few weeks before I have capacity, or I need to start using servers in the cloud.

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