列式数据库比较和DBA工作

Question

I'm trying to find a database solution and I came across Infobright and Amazon Redshift as potential solutions. Both are columnar databases. Infobright has been around for quite sometime whereas Amazon Redshift is newer.

1. What is the DBA effort between Infobright and Amazon Redshift?
2. How accessible is Infobright (API, query interface, etc.) vs AWS?
3. Where do both sit in your system architecture? Do the operate as a layer on top of your traditional RDBMS?
4. What is the DevOps effort to setting up both Infobright and Redshift?

I'm leaning a bit more towards Redshift because my application is hosted on AWS and I thought this would create tangible benefits in the long-run since everything is in AWS. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Firstly, I'll admit that I work for Infobright. I've done significant research into Redshift, and I feel I can give an honest opinion. I just wrote up a comparison between the two technologies; it can be found here: https://www.infobright.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=37

1. DBA Effort - Infobright requires very little administration. You cannot index; you don't need to partition/etc. It's an SMP architecture and scales well. Thus, you won't be dealing with multiple nodes. Redshift is also fairly simple. You will need to maintain sorts as well as ensure Analyse is run enough.

2. Infobright uses a MySQL Shell. Thus, any tool that can utilize MySQL can utilize Infobright. Therefore, you have the same set of tools/interfaces/APIs for Infobright as you do with MySQL. AWS does have an SQL interface, and it does have some API capabilities. It does require that you load directly from S3. Infobright loads from flat files and named pipes from local or remote servers.

3. Both databases are analytic databases. You would not want to use either as a transactional database. Instead, you typically push data from your transactional system to your analytic database.

4. DevOps to setup Infobright will be lower than Redshift. However, Redshift is not that overly complicated either. Maintenance of the environment is more of a requirement for Redshift, though.

Infobright does have many AWS-specific installations. In fact, we have implementations that approach nearly 100TB of raw storage on one server. That said, Redshift with many nodes can achieve petabyte scale on an implementation.

There are other factors that can impact your choice. For example, Redshift has very nice failover/HA options already built-in. On the flipside, Infobright can support many concurrent queries and users; Redshift limits queries to 15 regardless of cluster size.

Take a look at the document, and feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions about either technology.