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"Given modern trends, if a given query isn’t scalable vertically, it also isn’t scalable horizontally, which makes SQL fundamentally unscalable, period."
by jchrisa 17y ago
"Given modern trends, if a given query isn’t scalable vertically, it also isn’t scalable horizontally, which makes SQL fundamentally unscalable, period."
- barrkel 17y agoThat was the line that jumped out at me too. The justification: information grows exponentially, machines grow polynomially, therefore horizontal scaling doesn't help - the information growth is still exponential - and therefore vertical scaling is the same as horizontal scaling. Seems rather unrealistic and academic to me. The point about a query language that provides a complexity guarantee is more interesting.
- wmf 17y agoI agree. That quote applies to all possible queries, especially the worst-case ones that touch every record in the database. Obviously such queries don't scale in any paradigm, and thus they aren't useful for comparing systems. Small queries are more interesting IMO, because they scale on some systems but not others.