Re: GEMINI

[Chris Nolan]

Hi!

Thanks to the god of multiversioned databases, creator of InnoDB and 
all-round good human being
Heikki, I can tell you the following things with confidence:

1. InnoDB is the fastest disk-based transactional database engine on the 
planet, period. No ifs,
no buts, no conditions at all.
2. InnoDB is solid. Unless you do things like have two mysqld processes 
access the same table
space over a Sun NFS setup at the same time, things just work.
3. Hot backups are an option you can acquire, while still paying much 
less than you would for
any other DB.

Admittedly, I know very little about Gemini other than what's in some 
old versions of the MySQL
documentation (anyone want to point me in the direction of some solid 
info on what made this
table type stand out?). However, from what I can tell, Gemini was closer 
to MS SQL and DB2,
in that it depended on row locks for almost every operation. InnoDB 
doesn't depend on row
locks anywhere near as much (thanks to Oracle-style consistant reads) 
and the lack of phantoms
is quite nice. Foreign keys are also nice.

If performance is a serious issue, I'd recommend you set yourself up a 
test box, start dumping
data into it and throwing some queries at it (perhaps by setting up 
replication from the current
Gemini box to an InnoDB setup?).

Hope my ramblings are of some use! We currently host 20 GB of random 
garbage in InnoDB
tables, and the database takes up less time than my Samba installation!

Regards,

Chris

Nihal wrote:

>Can anyone tell me what happened to GEMINI?
> 
>We've been customers of MySQL for a while and about two years ago
>started using Nusphere's version to take advantage of their row level
>locking/ACID transaction safe table type GEMINI. Things went well for a
>while but one day I came back for help and poof, Nusphere has moved all
>support to Russia, then a couple weeks later no more support exists. I
>understand this was due to a violation on their part of the GPL.
> 
>So here I am stuck with 80GB's of GEMINI data and an aging version of
>MySQL prone to crash every couple of months.
> 
>Does anyone know, are the GEMINI developers from Nusphere somewhere else
>legally continuing this development?
> 
>If not can someone give me some migration suggestions? I've looked at
>InnoDB some, but am worried, will it provide equal performance to
>GEMINI? Also to migrate this I have found one copy of MySQL, version
>4.00beta, that has support for both GEMINI and INNODB, will using this
>version cause problems for me?
> 
>Thanks,
>Nihal 
> 
>
>  
>