edgelessdb VS skeema

There's some existing work by https://www.edgeless.systems/products/edgelessdb/ and their repo https://github.com/edgelesssys/edgelessdb

The title is a bit misleading: EdgelessDB was not developed by Microsoft but by a German startup (Edgeless Systems, https://www.edgeless.systems/ and https://github.com/edgelesssys/edgelessdb).

The announcement is about its availability on the Azure Marketplace.

Hi everyone! Our team just released EdgelessDB, an open-source database built on MariaDB that runs completely inside Intel SGX enclaves. As storage engine, it uses RocksDB with a custom encryption engine. The engine uses AES-GCM and is optimized for RocksDB’s specific SST file layout and the enclave environment. It has some nice properties like global confidentiality and verifiability and it considers strong attackers like malicious admins or rootkits. It also delivers rather low overheads (<10% for the TPC-C benchmark on Azure). In short: all data is only ever decrypted inside the enclave. This is different from other databases, where data and corresponding keys are processed in the clear in memory. We believe this is useful because (1) it’s very secure and (2) it enables some interesting use cases, like secure data pooling between parties. If you’re interested in trying it out: here’s a quickstart guide. In essence, you can run the Docker image with a single command on any recent Intel Xeon with SGX. Code and more info can be found on GitHub. Would be great to get your feedback on this :-)

If a tool blindly drops columns, that's just a bad tool! It doesn't mean the concept is flawed.

Thousands of companies successfully use declarative schema management. Google and Facebook are two examples at a large scale, but it's equally beneficial at smaller scales too. As long as the workflow has sufficient guardrails, it's safe and it speeds up development time.

Some companies use it to auto-generate migrations (which are then reviewed/edited), while others use a fully declarative flow (no "migrations", but automated guardrails and human review).

I'm the author of Skeema (https://github.com/skeema/skeema) which has provided declarative flow for MySQL and MariaDB since 2016. Hundreds of companies use it, including GitHub, SendGrid, Cash App, Wix, Etsy, and many others you have likely heard of. Safety is the primary consideration throughout all of Skeema's design: https://www.skeema.io/docs/features/safety/

Meanwhile a few declarative solutions that support Postgres include sqldef, Migra, Tusker (which builds on Migra), and Atlas.

I’d argue the obvious answer is address the lack of great answers for declarative schema migration in PostgreSQL. There is Skeema https://github.com/skeema/skeema but it doesn’t support Postgres and Prisma iirc forces you into an ORM, atlas looks perfect but has a nonstandard license.

Ahh I see now, you've founded https://github.com/skeema/skeema which is great!

Keep it up!

Using tmpfs for MySQL/MariaDB's data directory helps tremendously. If you're using Docker natively on Linux, use `docker run --tmpfs /var/lib/mysql ...` and that'll do the trick. Only downside is each container restart is slightly slower due to having to re-init the database instance from scratch.

Tuning the database server settings can help a lot too. You can add overrides to the very end of your `docker run` command-line, so that they get sent as command-line args to the database server. For example, use --skip-performance-schema to avoid the overhead of performance_schema if you don't need it in your test/CI environment.

For MySQL 8 in particular, I've found a few additional options help quite a lot: --skip-innodb-adaptive-hash-index --innodb-log-writer-threads=off --skip-log-bin

A lot of other options may be workload-specific. My product Skeema [1] can optionally use ephemeral containerized databases [2] for testing DDL and linting database objects, so the workload is very DDL-heavy, which means the settings can be tuned pretty differently than a typical DML-based workload.

[1] https://github.com/skeema/skeema/

[2] https://www.skeema.io/docs/options/#workspace

Atlas hasn’t made it on my radar until now — surprising considering how many stars it has. Based on the description, it looks like it can do something similar to skeema except it isn’t limited to one flavor of sql like skeema. I’m looking forward to trying it out in my next postgres project.

VARCHAR(N) can store N characters. So with utf8mb3, that's a max of 3N bytes worst-case. But with utf8mb4, it's now 4N bytes, which (with a high N) may exceed internal limits such as maximum length of an index key.

IIRC, there were additional problems in older versions of MySQL, situations where sort buffers were sized to a fixed length equal to the value's worst-case size or something like that. So sorting a large number of utf8mb4 values would use a lot more memory than utf8mb3 values (again, iirc, I might be wrong on this).

So the safer and more backwards-compatible approach was to introduce utf8mb4 as a new separate charset, and allow users to choose. MySQL 8 is now transitioning towards deprecating utf8mb3, and will finally make the utf8 alias point to utf8mb4 sometime in the near future.

That said, there are still a bunch of unpleasant uses of utf8mb3 internally in things like information_schema. I develop schema management tooling and recently lost a week to some of the more obscure ones in https://github.com/skeema/skeema/commit/bf38edb :)

I realize my paradigm on schema driven projects comes probably from my background. I found a very similar tool by chance when reading through my latest feeds and found this tool: https://github.com/skeema/skeema