4 ms·

Scalable RDBMS is not cheap. Sure, you can use a MySQL or a PostgreSQL server that you didn't need to purchase a license for[1], but the design and implementati

by delinka 16y ago

Scalable RDBMS is not cheap. Sure, you can use a MySQL or a PostgreSQL server that you didn't need to purchase a license for[1], but the design and implementation for Doing It Right take care, attention and time-- expenses that are not necessarily monetary. If you've built a fully scalable RDBMS-based web application, you won't be posting Show HN: My Weekend Project... Until someone builds a cloud hosting platform with RDBMS that can do the necessary magic bits, that is. [1] Yeah, yeah ... MySQL and their commercial licensing BS. It's been awhile but if memory serves and things haven't changed, you can't host a commercial web site backed my MySQL without A) releasing all your source or B) buying a license. IANAL.

michaelchisari 16y ago
the design and implementation for Doing It Right take care, attention and time Doesn't NoSQL require the same, only it shifts from being the job of a db engineer/sysadmin to that of the developers?
- jarin 16y ago
  That's essentially the crux of NoSQL. When your company consists of 90% developers and you're moving at breakneck speed, who wants to wait for Bob the Cranky DB Consultant? Just add another node to the cluster and let the auto-sharding figure it out.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    Auto-sharding is when you have a RDBMS that sees "SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 ON t1.c1 = t2.c2" and knows how to choose a plan which minimizes data going back and forth to make that happen. NoSQL instead makes you plow through n^2 records doing every join the hard way in the app, which is about as far from automatic as you can get. The problem is that the people who actually handle this correctly charge so much that I've never even seen their products in live use. Meanwhile free SQL databases are still really bad at it. But choosing an API that deliberately restricts you to only the worst possible query plans is not going to be part of the solution.
mdasen 16y ago
One can run a commercial website backed by MySQL using the GPL license. The GPL only requires you to release your code if they link off each other and you're distributing the application. Web sites don't usually have their code distributed. Even if you are distributing the code, it's very likely that you don't need to distribute it as GPL, but that's a longer discussion. Suffice it to say, you don't need a commercial MySQL license to run a website. There's no weekend project that's going to be "fully scalable". Scaling isn't just grabbing a NoSQL backend and declaring victory. A lot of scaling is figuring out how you're going to use your data and creating data structures that allow for fast, efficient, and scalable access. Many NoSQL data stores force one to think about how you're going to access the data more than SQL databases since the NoSQL stores usually don't support things like joins. One still has to do a lot of work to design to implement it right.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

by delinka 16y ago

michaelchisari 16y ago

the design and implementation for Doing It Right take care, attention and time Doesn't NoSQL require the same, only it shifts from being the job of a db engineer/sysadmin to that of the developers?

jarin 16y ago
That's essentially the crux of NoSQL. When your company consists of 90% developers and you're moving at breakneck speed, who wants to wait for Bob the Cranky DB Consultant? Just add another node to the cluster and let the auto-sharding figure it out.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Auto-sharding is when you have a RDBMS that sees "SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 ON t1.c1 = t2.c2" and knows how to choose a plan which minimizes data going back and forth to make that happen. NoSQL instead makes you plow through n^2 records doing every join the hard way in the app, which is about as far from automatic as you can get. The problem is that the people who actually handle this correctly charge so much that I've never even seen their products in live use. Meanwhile free SQL databases are still really bad at it. But choosing an API that deliberately restricts you to only the worst possible query plans is not going to be part of the solution.

mdasen 16y ago

One can run a commercial website backed by MySQL using the GPL license. The GPL only requires you to release your code if they link off each other and you're distributing the application. Web sites don't usually have their code distributed. Even if you are distributing the code, it's very likely that you don't need to distribute it as GPL, but that's a longer discussion. Suffice it to say, you don't need a commercial MySQL license to run a website. There's no weekend project that's going to be "fully scalable". Scaling isn't just grabbing a NoSQL backend and declaring victory. A lot of scaling is figuring out how you're going to use your data and creating data structures that allow for fast, efficient, and scalable access. Many NoSQL data stores force one to think about how you're going to access the data more than SQL databases since the NoSQL stores usually don't support things like joins. One still has to do a lot of work to design to implement it right.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]