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What is the percentage of web applications that really need all that scaling? How many database instances does Hypothes.is need? What about Airbnb? Duolingo? Fe

• kpil 11y ago
  Exactly. To handle massive loads, you can trade away transactional integrity and get increased performance AND a whole new range of complicated problems that was more or less solved for you, that you now have to take care of yourself. For some applications, the tradeoff is not a problem - and in others it requires a lot of work, up to more or less your own implementation of distributed transactions. I have this feeling that I can't shake off , that a lot of people think relational (transactional) databases are complicated, and fail to see why they actually are complicated. This probably is not the category of people that truly need to solve their performance problems though.
• beering 11y ago
  A lot of services would be fine with some big traditional databases - StackOverflow is one example that scaled vertically instead of horizontally. But a lot of services would also get by with a distributed DB with weak integrity guarantees. Does it really matter if a few upvotes get lost on a busy post? By the time you notice sporadic integrity issues in your DB, the startup will probably have failed or raised enough money to not care.