Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Percona compares Infobright and InifiDB

I've just noticed that Percona has compared ICE against InifiDB. Percona are in my opinion one of the bests experts in MySQL and the available storage engines, and are very active in the MySQL community.
They have made a 22 pages long comparison of the two storage engine, where they have looked at:

  • DDL and datatype support
  • Time to setup database and data loading
  • Size of the loaded data and compression
  • Ease of installation and security
  • Queries over large datasets
They used the ICE 3.3.2 beta and InfiniDB 1.5 GA.
Here is a very short summary of their conclusions, with focus on Infobright.

DDL and datatype support
Infobright supports more a number of MySQL data types which are not supported by InfiniDB, fx:
  • Year
  • Time
  • Tinytext
  • NOT NULL
When the use of these data types were necessary they used another data type which could hold the data instead.
Both database did not supply very good error messages when unsupported data types were used.

Loading Data
Even though ICE supports the MySQL "LOAD DATA INFILE" syntax, it is not compatible with the default MySQL settings, and as does who have tried ICE know, this can be very confusing in the beginning. But compared to InfiniDB loading data was much easier.
InfiniDB very about 147% faster to load a 900 GB dataset, and were in average 346 seconds faster per file.

Compression
InfiniDB doesn't compress data and therefore data size are much bigger than ICE. The data size in ICE were about 13% of the source data size.

Installation and security
Again ICE scored much better than InfiniDB both in security (5/5) and ease of installation and use (4/5).

Queries
This is the most interesting part, many queries (15/29) could not be executed on InfiniDB, as all aggregation functions aren't supported.
ICE were faster in the InfiniDB in 26 out of 29 queries, but as stated above not all queries could be executed by InfiniDB.

Conclusion
Percona thinks ICE performs better, are easier to use and give more accurate results than InfiniDB.

The full comparison can be download at the Infobright Whitepaper Resource Library.

1 comment:

  1. Hello,

    I read your posts with a great interest. It is good to have this kind of feedback. I am sure that it will guide us towards further ICE improvements.

    Recently, we have published a short paper on the ICE engine internals at one of academic conferences:

    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5575955

    Please let me know whether it may be useful. In particular, I would be grateful for your opinion whether publishing this type of papers helps in understanding what we are doing.

    If you have any problems with downloading the paper or any questions related to its contents, please let me know.

    Best greetings,

    Dominik

    slezak@infobright.com

    ReplyDelete