hydra VS ClickBench

Nice tool, only unfortunate name, consider changing it. Already very well know security tool named hydra https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra been around since 2001. Then facebook went ahead and named their config tool hydra https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra on top of it. Like we get it, hydra popular mythology but we could use more original naming for tools

This looks really impressive, and I'm excited to see how it performs on our data!

P.S., I think the name conflicts with Hydra, the configuration management library: https://hydra.cc/

I've been trying to learn PyTorch Lightning and Hydra in order to use/create my own custom deep learning template (e.g. like this) as it would greatly help with my research workflow. A lot of the work I do requires me to analyse metrics based on the logits/activations of the model.

However, hydra seems to have several limitations that are really annoying and are making me reconsider my choice. Most problematic is the inability to group parameters together in a multirun. Hydra only supports trying all combinations of parameters, as described in https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/1258, which does not seem to be a priority for hydra. Furthermore, hydras optuna optimizer implementation does not allow for early pruning of bad runs, which while not a deal breaker is definitely a nice to have feature.

Do you hate the fact that they don't let you return the config file: https://github.com/facebookresearch/hydra/issues/407

I kind of built this due to frustrations with Hydra. Hydra is an end to end framework, it locks you into a certain DL project format, it decides logging, model saving and a whole host of things. For example Hydra can do the same config file overwriting that I allow but you have to store the config file with the name config.yaml inside a specific folder. On top of that hydra doesn’t let you return the config file from the main function so you have to put all the major logic in the main function itself (link), the authors claim this is by design. I can find Hydra useful for a mature less experimental project. But in my robotics and ML research, I like being able to write code where I want and integrating it how I want, especially when debugging for which I think this package is useful. TLDR; If you just want the config file functionality use my package, if you want a complete DL project manager use Hydra. While hydra implements this config file functionality, it also adds a lot of restrictions to project structure that you might not like.

For managing configs of ML experiments (where each experiment can override a base config, and "variant" configs can further override the experiment config, etc), Hydra + Yaml + OmegaConf is really nice.

https://hydra.cc/

I admit I don't fully understand all the advanced options in Hydra, but the basic usage is already very useful. A nice guide is here:

https://florianwilhelm.info/2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_a...

Benchmarks: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com

So definitely compared against PostgreSQL, MariaDB it is significantly faster.

On par with lower-end Snowflake.

TimescaleDB primarily serves operational use cases: Developers building products on top of live data, where you are regularly streaming in fresh data, and you often know what many queries look like a priori, because those are powering your live APIs, dashboards, and product experience.

That's different from a data warehouse or many traditional "OLAP" use cases, where you might dump a big dataset statically, and then people will occasionally do ad-hoc queries against it. This is the big weather dataset file sitting on your desktop that you occasionally query while on holidays.

So it's less about "can you store weather data", but what does that use case look like? How are the queries shaped? Are you saving a single dataset for ad-hoc queries across the entire dataset, or continuously streaming in new data, and aging out or de-prioritizing old data?

In most of the products we serve, customers are often interested in recent data in a very granular format ("shallow and wide"), or longer historical queries along a well defined axis ("deep and narrow").

For example, this is where the benefits of TimescaleDB's segmented columnar compression emerges. It optimizes for those queries which are very common in your application, e.g., an IoT application that groups by or selected by deviceID, crypto/fintech analysis based on the ticker symbol, product analytics based on tenantID, etc.

If you look at Clickbench, what most of the queries say are: Scan ALL the data in your database, and GROUP BY one of the 100 columns in the web analytics logs.

- https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/blob/main/clickhous...

There are almost no time-predicates in the benchmark that Clickhouse created, but perhaps that is not surprising given it was designed for ad-hoc weblog analytics at Yandex.

So yes, Timescale serves many products today that use weather data, but has made different choices than Clickhouse (or things like DuckDB, pg_analytics, etc) to serve those more operational use cases.

We tested with 43 Clickbench SQL queries. Queries on the Variant columns are about 10% slower than those on pre-defined static columns, and 8 times faster than those on JSON columns. (For I/O reasons, most cold runs on JSONB data failed with OOM.)

I have a project dedicated to this topic: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench

It is important to explain the limitations of a benchmark, provide a methodology, and make it reproducible. It also has to be simple enough, otherwise it will not be realistic to include a large number of participants.

I'm also collecting all database benchmarks I could find: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/22398

Indeed, ClickHouse results were run on an older instance type of the same family and size (c5.4xlarge for ClickHouse and c6a.4xlarge for Timescale), so if anything ClickHouse results are at a slight disadvantage.

This is an open source benchmark - we'd love contributions from Timescale enthusiasts if we missed something: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/

Interesting project! Thank you for open sourcing and sharing. Agree that local and embedded analytics are an increasing trend, I see it too.

A couple of questions:

* I’m curious what the difficulties were in the implementation. I suspect it is quite a challenge to implement this support in the current SQLite architecture, and would curious to know which parts were tricky and any design trade-off you were faced with.

* Aside from ease-of-use (install extension, no need for a separate analytical database system), I wonder if there are additional benefits users can anticipate resulting from a single system architecture vs running an embedded OLAP store like DuckDB or clickhouse-local / chdb side-by-side with SQLite? Do you anticipate performance or resource efficiency gains, for instance?

* I am also curious, what the main difficulty with bringing in a separate analytical database is, assuming it natively integrates with SQLite. I may be biased, but I doubt anything can approach the performance of native column-oriented systems, so I'm curious what the tipping point might be for using this extension vs using an embedded OLAP store in practice.

Btw, would love for you or someone in the community to benchmark Stanchion in ClickBench and submit results! (https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/)

Disclaimer: I work on ClickHouse.