We have a full 14 pages (http://hyperdex.org/papers/hyperdex.pdf) describing the tradeoffs that went into the design and where the system's strengths and weaknesses lie.
Our statements that it is faster derive directly from our observations and evaluation in the paper.
A real hacker would never be dismissive of code and claims backed by an open git repo and documentation.
That said, HyperDex outperforms and provides stronger guarantees than previous key-value stores due to two architectural differences.
First is a new way to distribute data called "hyperspace hashing," whose description requires a picture, and can be found here: http://hyperdex.org/about/. This is quite different from the simple bucketing performed by memcached, Dynamo, Cassandra, Riak, MongoDB and others. See the latest slide set for an illustration of differences.
Second, HyperDex maintains replicas through a technique known as "value-dependent chaining." This enables the system to keep the replicas in sync without having to pay high overheads for coordination.
You asked for a technical description, and also mentioned that you were unwilling to read a long, detailed technical description, and asked for a "TL;DR." I hope the short summary was useful. If you have technical feedback, we'll be very happy to engage further.
Thanks, I see that I came off as overly negative, sorry.
The things you link to, and a login; article (that I haven't read yet) put things in another light :)
I still think your webpage needs some work though. I twice dismissed hyperdex as "just another nosql/storage project full of s"#¤". I'm probably not the only one.
It's difficult to put my finger on why it comes off as it does, but it might be the density of buzzwords in the first few sentences.
What I actually want to know when looking at new projects is:
- Where does it fit in the nosql "space"? Is it k.v.? graph? something else?
- Why is it different? Why do we need yet another .. [1]
(Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to answer this here, but IMO you should answer i on your homepage)
As it stands, it just reads: "It's faster!! It's better!! It's webscale!"