I’ve said it before, and, as is the nature of these things, I’ll almost certainly say it again: your database performance is only as good as your indexes.

That’s the grand thesis, so what does that mean? In any DB system — SQL, NoSQL, NewSQL, PostSQL, … — data gets ingested and organized. And the system answers queries. The pain point for most users is around the speed to answer queries. And the query speed (both latency and throughput, to be exact) depend on how the data is organized. In short: Good Indexes, Fast Queries; Poor Indexes, Slow Queries.

But building indexes is hard work, or at least it has been for the last several decades, because almost all indexing is done with B-trees. That’s true of commercial databases, of MySQL, and of most NoSQL solutions that do indexing. (The ones that don’t do indexing solve a very different problem and probably shouldn’t be confused with databases.)

It’s not true of TokuDB. We build Fractal Tree Indexes, which are much easier to maintain but can still answer queries quickly. So with TokuDB, it’s Fast Indexes, More Indexes, Fast Queries. TokuDB is usually thought of as a storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB. But it’s really a B-tree substitute, so we’re always on the lookout for systems where we can improving the indexing.

Enter MongoDB. MongoDB is beloved because it makes deployment fast. But when you peel away the layers, you get down to a B-tree, with all the performance headaches and workarounds that they necessitate.

That’s the theory, anyway. So we did some testing. We ripped out the part of MongoDB that takes care of secondary indices and plugged in TokuDB. We’ve posted the blogs before, but here they are again, the greatest hits of TokuDB+MongoDB: we show a 10x insertion performance, a 268x query performance, and a 532x (or 53,200% if you prefer) multikey index insertion performance. We also discussed covered indexes vs. clustered Fractal Tree Indexes.

We’re not MongoDB experts by any stretch but we wanted to share these results with the community and get people’s thoughts on applications where this might help, suggestions for next steps, and any other feedback. Please drop us a line if you are interested in becoming a beta tester.

We’ll also be at Strata next week in the Innovation Pavilion. Please swing by to learn more if you are there.