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ForHackernews 6 hours ago

Never heard of CedarDB.

Seems to be another commercial cloud-hosted thing offering a Postgres API? https://dbdb.io/db/cedardb

https://cedardb.com/blog/ode_to_postgres/

switz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was evaluating it recently but it's not FOSS, so buyer beware. I'm totally fine with commercialization, but I hesitate to build on top of data stores with no escape hatches or maintenance plans–especially when they're venture backed. It is self-hostable, but not OSS.

cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a startup founded by -- and built with tech coming out of research by -- some well known people in the DB research community.

Successor to Umbra, I believe.

I know somebody (quite talented) working there. It's likely to kick ass in terms of performance.

But it's hard to get people to pay for a DB these days.

atombender 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's probably going to be acquired. The last effort to commercialize the TUM (Technical University of Munich) database group's work was acquired by Snowflake and disappeared into that stack.

CedarDB is the commercialization of Umbra, the TUM group's in-memory database lead by professor Thomas Neumann. Umbra is a successor to HyPer, so this is the third generation of the system Neumann came up with.

Umbra/CedarDB isn't a completely new way of doing database stuff, but basically a combination of several things that rearchitect the query engine from the ground up for modern systems: A query compiler that generates native code, a buffer pool manager optimized for multi core, push-based DAG execution that divides work into batches ("morsels"), and in-memory Adaptive Radix Tries (never used in a database before, I think).

It also has an advanced query planner that embraces the latest theoretical advances in query optimization, especially some techniques to unnest complex multi-join query plans, especially with queries that have a ton of joins. The TUM group has published some great papers on this.

senderista 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Umbra is not an in-memory database (Hyper was). TUM gave up on the feasibility of in-memory databases several years ago (when the price of RAM relative to storage stopped falling).

cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I think the way Umbra was pitched when I watched the talks and read the paper was as more as "hybrid" in the sense that it aimed for something close to in-memory performance while optimizing the page-in/page-out performance profile.

The part of Umbra I found interesting was the buffer pool, so that's where focused most of my attention when reading though.

senderista 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you thinking of Hyper being acquired by Tableau?