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.