At the end of the NODES conference opening Keynote, Neo4j presents a demo of sub 20ms query performance on a graph of 11 shards, 101 shards and 1129 shards. Quite an impressive feat. Then the CEO asks “is this too good to be True?”. TLDR: Yes. Well, let’s find out why.
The “code” for the demo was released on github so we can dive in. We will start with the weirdest part of the code:
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Everything cool deserves an awesome mascot. Postgres has an elephant named Slonik. MySQL has a dolphin named Sakila. Linux has a Penguin named Tux. ScyllaDB has a sea monster. RedPanda has a… you guessed it, a Red Panda. Zig was too cool for one mascot so they have two “Ziguanas“. PHP has an elephant too. Rust has a Crab named Ferris. TerminusDB has a cowduck. Docker has a whale, but it was almost a giraffe. One of the most famous mascots around is the GitHub Octocat named Mona. Go has a Gopher and they even have a website where you can make your own gopher, how cool is that?
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There was a show called “30 Days” where people would be inserted in to a lifestyle completely different from their beliefs to see what would happen. The idea wasn’t so much to change their mind, but to help them (and the viewer) understand a little bit of both sides. My experience with Declarative Query languages so far has led me to the belief that they were ultimately a performance dead end. I’ve always known more than the database, which allowed me to hand-craft high performance queries using stored procedures. Building RageDB I decided to stay away from query languages, going as far as letting you write part of your query in “c” if you wanted to.
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Back in February, we added the ability to load a CSV file and alter the contents while importing it. We also added Date support to RageDB using a Lua library. This was a masterful job of copy and paste and got us lots of functionality very quickly. When we timed the import for LDBC SNB SF10 it came in at 28 minutes. Which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great. Let’s try to speed that up today.
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Typically we want to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to help the environment. But today we are going to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle the Lua Sandbox Environment to give us two additional sets of permissions. The first is “Read Write” in which a user can read and write to the database but cannot create new types of nodes or relationships or data types. The second is “Read Only” which does what it sounds like.
While we’re here, we’re going to one graph, two graph, rage graph, blue graph our way to multi database support. Let’s jump in:
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The idea of using a programing language as the way to write queries against the database makes many security folks hyperventilate. In order to lower their heart-rate and slow their breathing we have to limit the queries using a technique known as “sandboxing“. The Sol2 library we are using in RageDB lets us create an “environment” where our queries will run. Let’s see how we go about doing this.
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“That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies” — Alfred Tennyson. Before embarking on the journey of achieving something great, you are often told to imagine having already done it. This is the pseudo scientific belief that visualizing a positive outcome helps one achieve it. It propelled “The Secret” to sell 30 million copies worldwide. However, it isn’t the outcome we are supposed to be fantasizing about, but rather the execution of the actions required to accomplish our goal.
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Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Written by Blaise Pascal is often misattributed to Mark Twain. It reminds us to try to be brief. Too many people never learn this.
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Valentine’s Day was earlier this week, maybe you took your significant other to dinner, sent flowers or candy to your crush, even bought a card for that special someone. I bet however you didn’t profess your love to your favorite software library. I did. I love Roaring Bitmaps. Like Mariah Carey, I can’t live without it, so I won’t. I added Roaring Bitmaps to RageDB.
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The folks who build the database are not the same folks who use the database and that causes problems. It has been my number 1 complaint for the past decade or so. People building features in isolation can’t see the forest for the trees and the end user experience suffers. I ran into this video from Molham Aref where he puts it quite nicely:
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Max De Marzi 