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You make some good points. However, the original author's point basically boiled down to: if you define scalability as the problems you can scale an RDBMS to s
by wooster 17y ago
You make some good points.
However, the original author's point basically boiled down to: if you define scalability as the problems you can scale an RDBMS to solve, RDBMS systems are scalable. I'm not big on arguing the finer points of someone's tautology.
The particulars of a situation determine the scalability of a solution. For a lot of us working at web scale or on interesting new problems, an RDBMS won't scale. Sometimes it won't scale within the constraints we have, but sometimes it won't scale because we won't be able to build the system we're trying to build. His example of a company-internal billing system really only served to highlight the disconnect between the crowd following along well-trod ground, and the people out front doing innovative work.
- lucifer 17y ago"[SQL deal for when] "Data consistency and reliability is a primary concern"." I'm curious: lets say you have a tweeter scale app that must satisfy the consistency and reliability as a primary requirement. Is there really a NoSQL solution that can take you there without (effectively) raising the costs to the point that a scalable (money not an object) SQL solution would provide? (Kinda like how the difficult to extract North Sea oil became economically viable once oil prices crashed through a certain ceiling?)
- wmf 17y agoThe essence of NoSQL is that it gets its scalability by giving up consistency and reliability. Trying to run NYSE or Visa on NoSQL is pointless.
- evgen 17y agoWell, "reliability" can be sliced in a couple of different ways since that term can cover both the A & P in the CAP options and it can also mean the elimination of single points of failure and an architecture that can degrade gracefully when components fail. Some NoSQL systems let you select the mix of consistency and reliability you need at a rather fine-grained level -- one thing that does distinguish these systems from the traditional RDBMS is that you are almost never in an all or nothing situation regarding any particular part of the data space unless you explicitly want to create that choice to enable other options.
- rbranson 17y agoNoSQL gets scalability by giving up a huge feature set, and, yes, cross-object consistency. I question the lower reliability argument though. Dynamo, one of the original NoSQLs, allows each instance to specify how reliable they want writes to be. Most of the NoSQLs allow you to tune the reliability factor, just as MySQL and PostgreSQL allow you to do.
- ibsulon 17y agoNo. The author provides counterexamples to the argument, "RDBMSes don't scale." As for the "innovative work" versus "well-trod ground," there are still businesses who need better, more innovative solutions to well-trod problems, and I, for one, am not willing to ignore money on the table. The problem I'm working on works well with a combination RDBMS/key-value system for different pieces of the puzzle.