[furicane]

I tried to come up with a smart and polite comment but I can't. The target audience for memsql aren't developers or engineers. It's the management that has no idea about IT. I don't like closed-source solutions. I don't want to book a demo. I want to be able to read the source. I want to install it, use it, benchmark it, be sure that the results are 100% accurate. Sadly, I see this post as marketing ploy and I can't find any nice words for this product.

[manigandham]

You can install it, use it, benchmark it, and check everything yourself.

It's not open-source, but there is plenty of closed-source proprietary software, and plenty of buyers who care about solving their problems and paying money to get that done (and ensure the vendor stays alive).

If you don't want to use a closed-source product then that's your prerogative, but I don't see how you're making a dev/engineering decision by ignoring a product because of that.

[moocowtruck]

because the source is important, it tells the buyer they have a future if they no longer like your services; closed source means they are locked into whatever fresh hell might come upon your company which in turn unleashes fresh hell upon their decision to buy in.. in 2018+ it's just a smart decision to make

[manigandham]

The vast majority of companies can barely build their own products, let alone study the source code of complex 3rd-party software. A distributed SQL database is on the extreme end of knowledge required to even understand it, so I'm not sure how open-source is going to help you.

As a counter-example, rethinkdb is open-source but the company failed and nobody cares about using it anymore. What would you do with that? Start building new database features yourself? Or just get your data out and move to a different system?

[zzzcpan]

You will be able to at least maintain it, fix bugs, security issues. Maybe even start working on new features, promote your fork, revive some of the community, find people with relevant expertise, etc.

Databases are so lock-iny and critical that it's only natural for closed source database startups to be considered too risky to touch.

[manigandham]

Possible doesn't mean realistic. As stated, 99.99% of companies are not going to come close to understanding, forking, and running their own build of a database.

It's better to practice proper vendor management and weigh all the risks and realities instead. If you're not more capitalized and viable then your vendor, then you have more important things to worry about then your vendor disappearing overnight.

[paulsutter]

/Widely used/ open source projects will find continued support; the user base of a project is a crucial part of the decision. Rethinkdb had only one serious site, who found it easier to port to a thin layer on top of Postgres when rethink collapsed.

[rtpg]

That's not a technical decision though. That's a business decision.

A real technical reason might be "the ability to fix the software ourselves" or "easier debugging of the software". Avoiding vendor lock-in isn't a technical decision

[shin_lao]

Good luck with the source code of a database you didn't write...

[jessedhillon]

I recently was able to unfuck my way out of a 300GB data loss resulting from a failed DB upgrade. By looking into the commit history of PostgreSQL, finding the commit with the PG_CATALOG_VERSION I needed, and compiling from that revision, I was able to re-run the upgrade with the parameters I needed. I'm not sure what I would have done if that had been MS SQL Server or something else.

[manigandham]

You would send in a support ticket to the company and they would solve it for you.

[mmt]

> they would solve it for you

That hasn't been my experience, at least not on any suitable time scale.

I strongly suspect that the vast majority of those of us who have worked somewhere "not more capitalized and viable" than the vendor share that experience.

Even when a vendor's support engineer is fully capable of solving the problem, the sense of urgency can't reasonably be expected to match that of a much smaller customer facing potentially catastrophic data loss (or other existential-threat-level consequences).

[azifali]

While plenty of closed source software systems are still being widely used, I think the world is dramatically moving towards open source. The world has changed and I think these expectations of being able to leverage an open source software is here to stay. This despite the fact that a vast majority may never actually read, fork or modify the source code.

[loopp]

Disclaimer: I am a product manager at MemSQL, so I may be biased :)

There are a variety of ways to try out MemSQL yourself such as installing on Linux, Windows, Mac, AWS, etc, and maybe I am biased since I was an engineer before I became a PM, but we optimize our product currently exactly for technical people such as IT, devops, and of course, engineers. For a list of installation guides, check this link out: https://docs.memsql.com/guides/latest/install-memsql/

Take a look at our docs (docs.memsql.com) and you will see that we all actually are just a bunch of engineers and people with a technical background. Are there certain technical topics you feel are unclear here? I'm also happy to chat privately.

If you still feel this product isn't right for you, that is fine -- MemSQL's focus on query speed may not be for everyone. However, with this release of having a free product for people to try out, we definitely optimized exactly for people that want to try the product out :). I'm actually surprised you mention our product isn't for engineers/technicalPeople, because from our field of view, we actually sometimes see MemSQL as too technical, hence why we focused on usability in this release, ha!

Hope that answers some doubts you may have -- thanks for the comment.

[dman]

Some feedback - I cant appear to find any way to install on Windows on the following part of your website - https://docs.memsql.com/guides/latest/install-memsql/

[moocowtruck]

good catch i dont see it either..weird

[furicane]

Guys, I believe you are engineers that are doing an amazing job. But the whole "free up to 128GB" promotion is just.. wtf. And the website revolves around attracting IT managers, not engineers that make educated decisions related to project(s). I make decisions based on calculations, not based on shiny websites. I'm not undermining your product. It appears to be amazing. I'd love if it were free and open source. Heck, we'd probably spend a ton of money on it for paid support, scaling planning, consulting, deployment and what not. I just hate your business model, that's all. Let me have your program running without constraints! And because of it, I can't see a reason to use it. I choose to explore other venues that went down the open source route. I'm quite okay with not running the fastest option. No hard feelings, I sincerely wish you make a huge dent in this area and make a ton of money!

[Aeolun]

Free up to 128GB is practically free for up to 95% of applications. In both dev and prod.

I really don’t see how you could have a problem with that.

[AndyNemmity]

The problem is free up to 128GB is not 95% of problems you would run on an in memory database.

I have never seen a productive system that small. I’ve seen thousands.

[ryanjmills]

if you stored data on disk compressed in MemSQL's columnstore, you would use that 128 GB of RAM for query execution. on-disk data storage would not be limited. if that's not a productive system, then I must have imagined the whole data warehouse and data mart market

[mruts]

I've worked with MemSQL and it's both really easy to use and setup and very fast. FWIW, I'm not a manager.