Sometimes, Kevin, a technical master will realise the limitations of the tool, and not always suggest it as a solution for a problem that clearly calls for some

Sometimes, Kevin, a technical master will realise the limitations of the tool, and not always suggest it as a solution for a problem that clearly calls for something else. Of course, that's over-simplifying things. Sometimes you asked for things that were physically impossible. When you need 1Bn operations to complete a task, you can't do that with 1M worth of resources, no matter if you try to use MySQL, Cassandra, or text files to get that result. You see, some of us at Digg actually had real computer science degrees, where we learned algorithm worst-case complexity, and we understood you were asking too much of too few computers. And if you think back hard enough, you'll remember the answer was actually: "MySQL can't do that unless you get 10x more computers." Thanks for talking about your dissatisfaction with the theoretical limits of computing here, in this forum, where I had to find out about it third-hand, instead of actually talking to me face-to-face back when it could have made a difference. Signed lovingly, Your MySQL DBA from Digg.