> Here we have copies of user data inlined. This is Joe’s stream, and it has a copy of his user data, including his name and URL, at the top level. His stream,

> Here we have copies of user data inlined. This is Joe’s stream, and it has a copy of his user data, including his name and URL, at the top level. His stream, just underneath, contains Jane’s post. Joe has liked Jane’s post, so under likes for Jane’s post, we have a separate copy of Joe’s data. > You can see why this is attractive: all the data you need is already located where you need it. That doesn't sound attractive at all. That sounds more like a recipe for "we use five hundred times more RAM than the deduplicated data that we actually have" type of disaster. ...All for a production data set which could be "turned into about 1.2 million rows in MySQL." I think the moral is "If you think your data is too big for a relational database, you're almost certainly wrong."