4 ms·

Posts like this are important. We too often rely on a buzz-word heuristic and that's how you end up with dozens of random technologies that are harder to maint

Posts like this are important. We too often rely on a buzz-word heuristic and that's how you end up with dozens of random technologies that are harder to maintain and don't necessarily solve any of your problems. This method is good, because it shows that when you understand the problem the right way, you can find the right solution, even if by popularity it looks like a "step backwards" Massive Kudos.

millamox 10y ago
I strongly disagree. it would have been useful f they'd stuck to problems without well-known solutions. Sadly, they also mixed in issues which are easily solved, or in a particularly egregious case, where they just complain about a bug. As though MySQL never had a bug. That was silly. My read of it was: Postgres annoyed us a few times, and we got fed up with its, so now something different will annoy us. Please look forward to our blog post in 4 years about how we're using X instead of MySQL/Schemaless because those were also imperfect.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Almost all problems are already solved. "Solving" a problem today is mostly ego-stroking.
  - GuiA 10y ago
    Sweet, I have a few PhD thesis and NSF grant proposals I'd like your help on.
    - stephengillie 10y ago
      I'd love to help stroke your ego, but I see you're busy doing it yourself.
- thinkingkong 10y ago
  The issue is all solutions are imperfect. You just make tradeoffs and shuffle the problems around. Doing so deliberately is whats commendable.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I got a similar impression... though with Uber's scale, funding and resources, they probably could have worked with and through their issues with Postgres. I'm actually surprised they didn't take a multi-pronged approach to their issues. Since they're using Schemaless, I'm curious why they didn't go for one of the many non-sql databases that may well be a much closer match to their use case. It seems to me that Cassandra (C*) may have been a better match to their needs... yes it means more administrative and application tuning, but would definitely scale to meet their needs. RethinkDB would also likely be a better match to what they are wanting to do. That said, I've been holding out for some time on PostgreSQL's in the box replication story to take root and mature. There are definitely more mature features and solutions to sharding and replication around MySQL, I just tend to find MySQL to be brittle and every time I've ever worked with it, I have at least a half dozen WTF moments... from binary data handling/indexing, foreign key syntax, ANSI out of spec, and others. PostgreSQL has some great features, and once the replication issues settle in, it will become the default choice for a lot of projects in a lot of organizations. Though, mySQL/maria and even MS-SQL are currently better options for many SQL use cases.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    I'll preface what I'm about to say with "I have never worked for Uber and I don't know terribly much about their internal structure", but from my interviews with Uber and a few of their hires I know, it seems that they tend towards hiring totally independent teams from the existing staff when tackling big projects...including hiring an outsider manager to hire a whole team. I won't speculate as to the reasons for this publicly but I've drawn some interesting conclusions from this. A multi-pronged approach that might involve multiple stakeholders just doesn't seem like their way of doing things.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > though with Uber's scale, funding and resources, they probably could have worked with and through their issues with Postgres Then they wouldn't get to build cool new stuff and write blog posts about how they had to build cool new stuff because OMG UBER SCALE.
  - chucky_z 10y ago
- swasheck 10y ago
  thank you for more accurately stating what i was trying to say earlier.
juskrey 10y ago
Making a lot of "buzz-word" errors like that, I now use the simple heuristic: choose the oldest available technology that solves your problem. Also known as Lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
pbreit 10y ago
The problem is that people might get the wrong impression that this is relevant to them when for 99% of people it is not.

millamox 10y ago

I strongly disagree. it would have been useful f they'd stuck to problems without well-known solutions. Sadly, they also mixed in issues which are easily solved, or in a particularly egregious case, where they just complain about a bug. As though MySQL never had a bug. That was silly. My read of it was: Postgres annoyed us a few times, and we got fed up with its, so now something different will annoy us. Please look forward to our blog post in 4 years about how we're using X instead of MySQL/Schemaless because those were also imperfect.

stephengillie 10y ago
Almost all problems are already solved. "Solving" a problem today is mostly ego-stroking.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Sweet, I have a few PhD thesis and NSF grant proposals I'd like your help on.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    I'd love to help stroke your ego, but I see you're busy doing it yourself.
thinkingkong 10y ago
The issue is all solutions are imperfect. You just make tradeoffs and shuffle the problems around. Doing so deliberately is whats commendable.
tracker1 10y ago
I got a similar impression... though with Uber's scale, funding and resources, they probably could have worked with and through their issues with Postgres. I'm actually surprised they didn't take a multi-pronged approach to their issues. Since they're using Schemaless, I'm curious why they didn't go for one of the many non-sql databases that may well be a much closer match to their use case. It seems to me that Cassandra (C*) may have been a better match to their needs... yes it means more administrative and application tuning, but would definitely scale to meet their needs. RethinkDB would also likely be a better match to what they are wanting to do. That said, I've been holding out for some time on PostgreSQL's in the box replication story to take root and mature. There are definitely more mature features and solutions to sharding and replication around MySQL, I just tend to find MySQL to be brittle and every time I've ever worked with it, I have at least a half dozen WTF moments... from binary data handling/indexing, foreign key syntax, ANSI out of spec, and others. PostgreSQL has some great features, and once the replication issues settle in, it will become the default choice for a lot of projects in a lot of organizations. Though, mySQL/maria and even MS-SQL are currently better options for many SQL use cases.
- busterarm 10y ago
  I'll preface what I'm about to say with "I have never worked for Uber and I don't know terribly much about their internal structure", but from my interviews with Uber and a few of their hires I know, it seems that they tend towards hiring totally independent teams from the existing staff when tackling big projects...including hiring an outsider manager to hire a whole team. I won't speculate as to the reasons for this publicly but I've drawn some interesting conclusions from this. A multi-pronged approach that might involve multiple stakeholders just doesn't seem like their way of doing things.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > though with Uber's scale, funding and resources, they probably could have worked with and through their issues with Postgres Then they wouldn't get to build cool new stuff and write blog posts about how they had to build cool new stuff because OMG UBER SCALE.
- chucky_z 10y ago
swasheck 10y ago
thank you for more accurately stating what i was trying to say earlier.

juskrey 10y ago

Making a lot of "buzz-word" errors like that, I now use the simple heuristic: choose the oldest available technology that solves your problem. Also known as Lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

pbreit 10y ago

The problem is that people might get the wrong impression that this is relevant to them when for 99% of people it is not.