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Given that HN is primarily peopled by founders of small bootstrapped startups, it's surprising how many advocates of key/value stores you see around here. Over

Given that HN is primarily peopled by founders of small bootstrapped startups, it's surprising how many advocates of key/value stores you see around here. Overgeneralizing, key/value datastores are useful for enormulous things that operate on Twitter/Facebook scale and handle loads measured in thousands of operations per second. Looking at a few existing services that need that sort of throughput, you'll quickly notice that they're all backed by tens of millions of VC and have big teams they can devote to dealing with the overhead needed to build Big Scalable Things. On the other hand, if you look at the dozens of "little services that charge people money to use them" that the typical bootstrapped startup founder should be striving to build, you'll notice that they all would work just fine on a relational database. So given that there are tools to get you shipped 10X as fast on an oldskool RDMS, it's surprising to see that ANY of these lean little startups would choose to go with NoSQL right out of the gate.

ROFISH 17y ago
I agree. There's absolutely no problem with using, for example, ActiveRecord and MySQL when using Rails because it's the default option and it's not a completely horrible option as some of the NoSQL crowd says. Due to the vast number of libraries for any language, and the vast number of helper/managers like ActiveRecord or DataMapper, I'm surprised nobody is advocating them more as they do support the "lean, fast, daily updates" while still small. When you need a higher performing system, it's available, but take advantage of all the previous library research. You're doing a disservice if you spend too much time to ship on exotic system, when you don't need it for another 1-3 years.
Supermighty 17y ago
This is very close to my line of thinking. What real benefit is there starting out with NoSQL when most websites really don't need to scale that big.
- Supermighty 17y ago
  Though I do think there will come a time when it will be just as easy to start with NoSQL as SQL.

ROFISH 17y ago

I agree. There's absolutely no problem with using, for example, ActiveRecord and MySQL when using Rails because it's the default option and it's not a completely horrible option as some of the NoSQL crowd says. Due to the vast number of libraries for any language, and the vast number of helper/managers like ActiveRecord or DataMapper, I'm surprised nobody is advocating them more as they do support the "lean, fast, daily updates" while still small. When you need a higher performing system, it's available, but take advantage of all the previous library research. You're doing a disservice if you spend too much time to ship on exotic system, when you don't need it for another 1-3 years.

Supermighty 17y ago

This is very close to my line of thinking. What real benefit is there starting out with NoSQL when most websites really don't need to scale that big.

Supermighty 17y ago
Though I do think there will come a time when it will be just as easy to start with NoSQL as SQL.