875X improvement from RonDB 21.04.17 to 22.10.4

At Hopsworks we are working on ensuring that the online feature store will be able to perform complex join operations in real-time. This means that queries that could use data from multiple tables can be easily integrated into machine learning applications.

Today most feature stores use key-value stores like Redis and DynamoDB. These systems have no capability to issue complex join queries, if this is required the feature store will have to write complex code to handle this and this is likely to involve multiple roundtrips and thus cause unwanted latency.

Hopsworks feature store uses RonDB as its online feature store. RonDB can handle any SQL operations that MySQL can handle. Actually RonDB has even support for parallelising the join queries and pushing the filtering and joining down to the RonDB data nodes where data resides.

This means that users of the Hopsworks feature store can integrate more features from multiple feature groups in online inferencing requests. This means that things credit fraud detection can be made much more intelligent by taking more features into account in the inferencing requests.

This means that performance of real-time join queries becomes more important in RonDB. To evaluate how RonDB develops in this are I ran a set of tests using TPC-H queries from DBT3 against RonDB 21.04.17 and RonDB 22.10.4 (not released yet). I also ran tests against MySQL 8.0.35 (RonDB 22.10.4 is based on MySQL 8.0.35 with loads of added RonDB features).

The results were interesting, the improvement in Q20 was the highest I have seen in my career. The performance improved from 70 seconds to 80 milliseconds, thus an 875x speedup or 87500% improvement. Q2 had a 360x improvement. So RonDB 22.10.4 is much better equipped for more complex queries compared to RonDB 21.04. MySQL 8.0.35 had similar performance to RonDB 22.10.4 with an average of around 20% slower, this is mostly due to performance improvements in RonDB, not algorithmic changes.

When using complex queries the query optimiser tries to find an optimal plan, sometimes however better plans are available and one can add hints in the SQL query to ensure a better plan is used.

The RonDB team isn't satisfied with this however, we have realised that evaluating aggregation is also very important when the online feature store stores a time window of certain features. This means that RonDB can compute aggregate dynamically and thus provide more accurate predictions.

Early tests of some simple single table queries showed an improvement of 4-5x and we expect we will be able to get to 10-20x improvements in quite a few queries of this sort.

New LTS version of RonDB, RonDB 22.10.2

 After a very thorough development and test period we are proud to announce the general availability of the RonDB 22.10 LTS serie with the release of RonDB 22.10.2 today. There is also a new version of the old LTS version RonDB 21.04.16 released today.

A complete list of the new features is provided in the RonDB Documentation.

The most important new feature is the support of variable sized disk rows. This means a very significant saving of disk space, up to 10x more data can be stored on the same disk space as with RonDB 21.04. In addition RonDB 22.10 contains a major quality improvement using disk columns. This means that RonDB is now prepared for the introduction of features in the Hopsworks Feature Store using disk columns. This will provide significant cost savings in storing lots of features in the Hopsworks Online Feature Store.

Another important feature in RonDB 22.10 is that all major data structures are now using the Global Data Manager, this ensures that the memory management inside RonDB is much more flexible. This was the final step of a long project described here.

As usual we have also been working on performance in this new version. Write throughput has been siginficantly improved, enterprise applications using read locks will see greater scalability and also throughput at very high load has been significantly improved leading to up to 30% better throughput in RonDB 22.10.2 compared to RonDB 21.04. This improvement comes from further improvements to ideas presented in this blog. This change makes it possible to be much more flexible in using CPU resources. More details on performance comes later.

In this blog we have described the testing process that we have had with RonDB. RonDB 22.10 is already running in production in a number of installations and is part of Hopsworks 3.7 released recently. This Hopsworks version introduces support of fine-tuning LLMs for GenAI. This version of Hopsworks also supports multi-region support.

Come to our webinar where we will present more information about RonDB and what it can be used for.

Since Oracle now made MySQL 8.0 an LTS version we plan to merge the changes from MySQL 8.0 series into future RonDB 22.10 versions. Bug fixes and features of interest to Oracle is contributed back to MySQL.

For those interested in following the development of RonDB in real-time the tree is here, the branch where RonDB 22.10.2 is found is called 22.10.1. The development branch of RonDB 22.10 is found in 22.10-main. We are also working on new features of RonDB in forks of this tree by the developers. 22.10-main already have a new feature supporting more than 20k table objects and an even more improved thread model providing an improvement of around 5% better throughput. There is also long-term development of rate limits and quotas, enabling RonDB to be used in multi-tenant environments and pushdown of aggregations, enabling a speedup of 10-1000x of some queries used in Feature Stores.