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Meanwhile Amazon and AWS have essentially banned putting a relational database behind any publicly facing website or service.
by discodave 9y ago
Meanwhile Amazon and AWS have essentially banned putting a relational database behind any publicly facing website or service.
- darksaints 9y agoWhile I don't doubt that they'll tell you that that was a scaling decision, it actually has more to do with an architectural decision that proved to be difficult to overcome once it's flaw became apparent. They operated warehouses using a monolithic oracle database, one for each FC. They had hundreds of different services using the same database. Whenever one service wanted to do something new, they had to spend a massive amount of time running their proposed database change past every team on the database. I've seen a single column addition take 9 months and hundreds of engineer hours to get approved. So once the warehouses got really big, sharding was the obvious answer but they couldn't make sharding work because they couldn't coordinate their way out of their mess they created. They couldn't scale because they engineered themselves into a corner that made it impossible to use normal best practices for scaling SQL databases. NoSQL has an interesting lack of a feature that solves their problem. Because theyre not relational, they don't really work very well sharing data across services and teams, so they don't get into major coordination tangles on shared databases. Maybe that works for them, but it's more of an indictment of their engineering culture than it is a slight on SQL databases. And it's pretty punitive in a TSA kind of way: We fucked up once so none of you can have nice things anymore.
- seymores 9y agoI'm interested to know where you got this from -- is there a link or video somewhere to find out more?