There are a couple of other contenders in this space. DVC (https://dvc.org/) seems most similar.
If you're interested in something you can self-host... I work on Pachyderm (https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm), which doesn't have a Git-like interface, but also implements data versioning. Our approach de-duplicates between files (even very small files), and our storage algorithm doesn't create objects proportional to O(n) directory nesting depth as Xet appears to. (Xet is very much like Git in that respect.)
The data versioning system enables us to run pipelines based on changes to your data; the pipelines declare what files they read, and that allows us to schedule processing jobs that only reprocess new or changed data, while still giving you a full view of what "would" have happened if all the data had been reprocessed. This, to me, is the key advantage of data versioning; you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on compute. Being able to undo an oopsie is just icing on the cake.
Xet's system for mounting a remote repo as a filesystem is a good idea. We do that too :)
We have found pointer files to be surprisingly efficient as long as you don't have to actually materialize those files. (Git's internals actually very well done). Our mount mechanism does avoid materializing pointer files which makes it pretty fast even for repos with very large number of files.
For bigger annex repos with lots of pointer files, I just disable the git-annex smudge filters. Consider whether smudge filters are requirement, or a convenience. The smudge filter interface does not scale that well at all.
> The data versioning system enables us to run pipelines based on changes to your data; the pipelines declare what files they read, and that allows us to schedule processing jobs that only reprocess new or changed data, while still giving you a full view of what "would" have happened if all the data had been reprocessed. This, to me, is the key advantage of data versioning; you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on compute. Being able to undo an oopsie is just icing on the cake.
...isn't that just parsing git diff --name-only A..B tho ? "Process only files that changed since last commit" is extremely simple problem to solve.
Yeah, that's the basics of it. Just make sure all the output is atomic, scale up the workers, handle inputs that are joins, retry when the workers get rescheduled, etc.
Is DVC useful/efficient at storing container images (Docker)? As far as I remember they are just compressed tar files. Does the compression defeat its chunking / differential compression?
If you're interested in something you can self-host... I work on Pachyderm (https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm), which doesn't have a Git-like interface, but also implements data versioning. Our approach de-duplicates between files (even very small files), and our storage algorithm doesn't create objects proportional to O(n) directory nesting depth as Xet appears to. (Xet is very much like Git in that respect.)
The data versioning system enables us to run pipelines based on changes to your data; the pipelines declare what files they read, and that allows us to schedule processing jobs that only reprocess new or changed data, while still giving you a full view of what "would" have happened if all the data had been reprocessed. This, to me, is the key advantage of data versioning; you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on compute. Being able to undo an oopsie is just icing on the cake.
Xet's system for mounting a remote repo as a filesystem is a good idea. We do that too :)