I’ve mentioned before the fine work that Mark Litwintschik does putting data management systems through their paces using a dataset of 1.1 billion taxi rides. He’s back with another post on BrytlytDB.
BrytlytDB is an in-GPU-memory database built on top of PostgreSQL. It’s operated using many of PostgreSQL’s command line utilities, it’s wire protocol compatible so third-party PostgreSQL clients can connect to BrytlytDB and queries are even parsed, planned and optimised by PostgreSQL’s regular codebase before the execution plan is passed off to GPU-optimised portions of code BrytlytDB offer.
There have been quite a few posts by Litwintschik since I noted his efforts. What caught my eye this time is the mention of the, new to me, BrytlytDB. BrytlytDB apparently leverages a lot of the core capabilities of the PostgreSQL code base and presents a lot of API compatibility. To quote from the homepage, “Brytlyt combines the power of GPUs with patent pending IP and integrates with PostgreSQL.”
I probably have a bit of myopia, but it feels like PostgreSQL essentially defines the baseline for commercial DBMS functionality these days.
And once again, I have to commend Litwintschik on the thoroughness of his reporting on these posts. One of the few technical bloggers who provides enough detail to actually approach “reproducibility.”