Item: SingleStore
Rating: 9
Author: Sergiu Cazac

Overall Satisfaction with SingleStore

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using SingleStore to power our whole app database layer.
We use it both for our basic tables and also for the analytical ones.

The magic is that we don't need to have multiple types of databases, it's just a single database which is a drop-in replacement for MySQL and it works almost exactly the same at the API level with some differences, which we can live with but hope they can improve upon (like column adjustments on the fly, foreign keys, etc.)

Pros and Cons

Pros

Analytical queries
Basic SQL usage similar to how you would use MySQL

Cons

Column mutations (from null to not null, or type changes)
Foreign keys
Unique columns (for columnstore)

Return on Investment

No engineering overhead for maintaining the db so no makes up for the price in a way
We are able to provide better analytics to our customers - providing more value

Performance

It works very well, but there're issues sometimes as we're on the lowest tier and when the rolling update happens, the capacity is not enough for our load. I would expect SingleStore to handle more load with the servers we have. Otherwise, we have no issues with the performance.

The analytical queries are very quick even on our setup.

Consolidation

It's very effective as we have a single source of truth which is our ORM, which maps to tables in SingleStore, like it would with MySQL but also gives us the power of analytical queries without having to manage an external service.

Alternatives Considered

ClickHouse and Elasticsearch

ClickHouse - would still require us to have a separate db.
Elasticsearch - seemed too complex for us.

Neither allowed us to keep things in 1 place.

Key Insights

Do you think SingleStore delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with SingleStore's feature set?

Yes

Did SingleStore live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SingleStore go as expected?

Would you buy SingleStore again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Hetzner IaaS, Symfony, Vue.js

Likelihood to Recommend

It's perfect if you don't want to juggle multiple database providers for analytical and other app data. Also, it's great that it's managed.

Comments

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Great database solution for apps that require analytics and those who don't want to juggle db providers