differential-dataflow VS go-ds-crdt

Some recent solutions to this problem include Differential Dataflow and Materialize. It would be neat if postgres adopted something similar for live-updating materialized views.

https://github.com/timelydataflow/differential-dataflow

https://materialize.com/

I'm looking for this but can't find it, how does this project compare to differential dataflow?

As a sibling commenter mentioned, it's built on timely dataflow (which is lower-level), but that already has differential dataflow[0] built on top of it by the same authors.

How do they differ?

[0]: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow

hi! sujay from convex here. I remember reading about your "reverse query engine" when we were getting started last year and really liking that framing of the broadcast problem here.

as james mentions, we entirely re-run the javascript function whenever we detect any of its inputs change. incrementality at this layer would be very difficult, since we're dealing with a general purpose programming language. also, since we fully sandbox and determinize these javascript "queries," the majority of the cost is in accessing the database.

eventually, I'd like to explore "reverse query execution" on the boundary between javascript and the underlying data using an approach like differential dataflow [1]. the materialize folks [2] have made a lot of progress applying it for OLAP and readyset [3] is using similar techniques for OLTP.

[1] https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow

[2] https://materialize.com/

[3] https://readyset.io/

differential dataflow which is used to power materialize db

It's partially inspired by Linq, so the similarity you see is expected.

It's not really arbitrary structures so much, though you're mostly free in what record type you use in a relation (structs and tagged enums are typical, though).

The incremental part is that you can feed it changes to the input (additions/retractions of facts) and get changes to the outputs back with low latency (you can alternatively just use it to keep an index up-to-date, where you can quickly look up based on a key (like a materialized view in SQL)).

This [0] section in the readme of the underlying incremental dataflow framework may help get the concept across, but feel free to follow up if you're still not seeing the incrementality.

[0]: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow#an-e...

I forgot: key-value store using MD-CRDTs was implemented here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ds-crdt

The trickiest part was not the CRDT, but the DAG traversal with multiple workers processing parallel updates on multiple branches and switching CRDT-DAG roots as they finish branches.

In https://github.com/ipfs/go-ds-crdt, every node in the Merkle DAG has a "Priority" field. When adding a new head, this is set to (maximum of the priorities of the children)+1.

Thus, this priority represents the current depth (or height) of the DAG at each node. It is sort of a timestamp and you could use a timestamp, or whatever helps you sort. In the case of concurrent writes, the write with highest priority wins. If we have concurrent writes of same priority, then things are sorted by CID.

The idea here is that in general, a node that is lagging behind or not syncing would have a dag with less depth, therefore its writes would have less priority when they conflict with writes from others that have built deeper DAGs. But this is after all an implementation choice, and the fact that a DAG is deeper does not mean that the last write on a key happened "later".

The idea of DAG-embedded CRDTs is far from new and was introduced here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00107 (I'm among the authors)

Unfortunately, the verification that the author proposes (not accepting new updates until the dag below is verified) will need a lot of caveats for real world usage.

Currently we use these CRDTs for a key value database of 40M+ keys in a deployment of ipfs-cluster, which uses https://github.com/ipfs/go-ds-crdt .

Not 100% the thing, but potentially related work in this area:

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ds-crdt

(See link to paper, and links to other projects in it, like OrbitDB).