5 ms·

How many systems are out there that will run at YouTube/Facebook/etc scale without "huge amount of engineering resources to make it work"? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

by jhugg 10y ago

user5994461 10y ago
System that will run at hundreds of times the scale of MySQL without requiring the equivalent hassle in engineering: Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Riak, RedShift, BigQuery, DynamoDB, BigTable, Spanner, Terradata, S3...
- metaphorm 10y ago
  systems that are designed as distributed datastores run as managed, hosted services on MASSIVE cloud datacenters...yea those will scale. if you're trying to keep your hosting overhead down though none of those is available (except S3 I suppose, which is super cheap, but also not really a datastore solution) but a basic app server running MySQL (or similar) is. now, I'm not saying anybody should expect scaling for free. I'm just saying you're comparing apples to oranges here. The apples to apples comparison is basic app server running MySQL vs. basic app server running MongoDB. the myth is that the MongoDB instance inherently scales better than the MySQL instance. it doesn't, particularly. it has better write performance, but not much else that gives it better scalability. and the real point of the article is to combat some of the magical thinking that has lead to many bad decisions from misinformed developers who heard a rumor that a NoSQL datastore has orders of magnitude better performance characteristics than an RDBMS.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    When we talk about scaling (not necessarily to the size of reddit/youtube) that implies you're already way beyond an app running with a mysql. > MongoDB MongoDB is a pile of crap and a shame to all the NoSQL datastores. Please don't bring MongoDB in a talk about databases. If that is your only experience of NoSQL, it is perfectly normal that you think of NoSQL as a mistake to never use ;)
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      No need to convince me of Mongo's problems. I struggle to think of a use case for it where I wouldn't prefer to use the JSON store functionality of Postgres instead. My best experience with NoSQL (in terms of it working ok and not otherwise fucking up the system) has been with HBase on a cluster running map/reduce jobs. That was well suited for the purpose (mostly). I'm sure glad nobody had any illusions about using that as a production datastore for a user facing web app though.

How many systems are out there that will run at YouTube/Facebook/etc scale without "huge amount of engineering resources to make it work"? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

by jhugg 10y ago

How many systems are out there that will run at YouTube/Facebook/etc scale without "huge amount of engineering resources to make it work"? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

user5994461 10y ago

System that will run at hundreds of times the scale of MySQL without requiring the equivalent hassle in engineering: Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Riak, RedShift, BigQuery, DynamoDB, BigTable, Spanner, Terradata, S3...

metaphorm 10y ago
systems that are designed as distributed datastores run as managed, hosted services on MASSIVE cloud datacenters...yea those will scale. if you're trying to keep your hosting overhead down though none of those is available (except S3 I suppose, which is super cheap, but also not really a datastore solution) but a basic app server running MySQL (or similar) is. now, I'm not saying anybody should expect scaling for free. I'm just saying you're comparing apples to oranges here. The apples to apples comparison is basic app server running MySQL vs. basic app server running MongoDB. the myth is that the MongoDB instance inherently scales better than the MySQL instance. it doesn't, particularly. it has better write performance, but not much else that gives it better scalability. and the real point of the article is to combat some of the magical thinking that has lead to many bad decisions from misinformed developers who heard a rumor that a NoSQL datastore has orders of magnitude better performance characteristics than an RDBMS.
- user5994461 10y ago
  When we talk about scaling (not necessarily to the size of reddit/youtube) that implies you're already way beyond an app running with a mysql. > MongoDB MongoDB is a pile of crap and a shame to all the NoSQL datastores. Please don't bring MongoDB in a talk about databases. If that is your only experience of NoSQL, it is perfectly normal that you think of NoSQL as a mistake to never use ;)
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    No need to convince me of Mongo's problems. I struggle to think of a use case for it where I wouldn't prefer to use the JSON store functionality of Postgres instead. My best experience with NoSQL (in terms of it working ok and not otherwise fucking up the system) has been with HBase on a cluster running map/reduce jobs. That was well suited for the purpose (mostly). I'm sure glad nobody had any illusions about using that as a production datastore for a user facing web app though.