Re: Should MonetDB really be used in production?

Hi Frédéric, We use MonetDB as the backend for all our search solutions, for many years already. Like you, we put MonetDB under quite some stress, we find many bugs, and we often feel the need to customize it to better serve our own purposes. We also experience stability issues, but most of the times it's because we can't resist the temptation to work on the latest release. My own opinion, in short: we do need to put some effort in it ("expect problems and eat them for breakfast"), but it still pays off. There aren't that many alternatives for us - our products would simply be ridiculous if they relied on PostgreSQL or alike. Roberto spinque.com PS. related discussion on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10087647/monetdb-anyone-uses-it-in-produc... On 18 June 2015 at 12:44, Anthony Damico wrote:

yo frederic, answer to your question depends on whether you want a rocket ship that occasionally needs tlc or a horse. i've submitted 20 bugs, the folks at monetdb work hard, fix things fast, just keep reporting and then re-write the query with a workaround. or gallop away on some trusty steed. ps psa if you make it to amsterdam ask them for a keychain w cute wooden shoes peace

https://www.monetdb.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&email1=ajdamico&emailassigned_to1=1&emailcc1=1&emaillongdesc1=1&emailreporter1=1&emailtype1=substring&order=changeddate%2Cpriority%2Cbug_severity&query_based_on=&query_format=advanced

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 6:26 AM, Martin Kersten wrote:

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Hi Frederic

Thank you for your interest and (private) enhancements of the MonetDB code base. Would be nice to share some of those to the community if relevant for a larger audience. Pushing a piece of technology that large and complex is a challenge for all involved.

Your bugreport will be taken up in the next round of software improvements. It seems you retract the creation of 'foo' by releasing the savepoint record, dropping it from further consideration. Clearly, you won't find it anymore. Enhanced savepoint management is on our list of 'unsupported' features.

https://www.monetdb.org/Documentation/Manuals/SQLreference/Features/unsuppor...

Your request puts it into view for re-consideration.

You can have a look at the extensive regression testing that takes place on a daily basis and covers both functional and user supplied bug reports. https://www.monetdb.org/Developers/NightlyTesting

For business urgent issues you can always contact MonetDB Solutions to find a solution for your problem.

regards, Martin Kersten

On 18/06/15 10:44, Frédéric Jolliton wrote:

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Greetings,

We filled a bug few days ago about simple SAVEPOINT usage corrupting the database (both in Oct2014-SP4 and tip of hg). This is worrying us a lot, because that's yet another bug easy to trigger.

We're studying MonetDB extensively for our future needs. We've written optimizers, custom aggregate functions in C, and we've studied many internal aspects.

But yet, from time to time, we are hit by bugs when performing simple, trivial queries. You can see the history of bugs we filled on the bugtracker (regarding UNION, SELECT, ..). This become time consuming.

This make us nervous because we might have hard time trusting our complexes queries run by MonetDB.

The performance are stunning, but the quality seems not high enough for production. Projects like PostgreSQL shows that even Open Source projects can attains incredible stability and robustness. (Admittedly there are many more contributors to PostgreSQL.)

Note that we understand that it is a complex software, and that it is hard to cover all possible corner cases in tests.

But we're wondering how stable MonetDB is expected to be. Is this really used in production?

Regarding the MonetDB website, the primary source of information for the project, we've not found any reference documentation regarding all the supported SQL features. Sure, there is a page listing what is *not* supported, there are pages on various topics, but it is unclear if SAVEPOINT is really supported. (If I can say, I think that the website probably needs some refresh and better navigation.)

Here is the latest bug I was talking about:

$ bin/mclient -p 50005 test Welcome to mclient, the MonetDB/SQL interactive terminal (Oct2014-SP4) Database: MonetDB v11.19.13 (Oct2014-SP4), 'mapi:monetdb://fjolliton:50005/test' Type \q to quit, \? for a list of available commands auto commit mode: on sql>start transaction; auto commit mode: off sql>create table foo (a int); operation successful (0.528ms) sql>savepoint sp1; auto commit mode: off sql>release savepoint sp1; auto commit mode: off sql>commit; auto commit mode: on sql>select * from foo; +---+ | a | +===+ +---+ 0 tuples (0.9s)

So far, so good. Now try to connect again:

$ bin/mclient -p 50005 test Welcome to mclient, the MonetDB/SQL interactive terminal (Oct2014-SP4) Database: MonetDB v11.19.13 (Oct2014-SP4), 'mapi:monetdb://fjolliton:50005/test' Type \q to quit, \? for a list of available commands auto commit mode: on sql>select * from foo; SELECT: no such table 'foo'

Whoops !

Regards,

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