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Wow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?
by dheera 5y ago
Wow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoProbably because a lot of those benefits don't actually translate that well towards their problem space. These aren't a bunch of 20 year olds throwing together a MongoDB, they're professionals using tools to actually make a product
- williamdclt 5y agoI don't think the people behind Spanner are a bunch of 20yo throwing together a MongoDB
- jacquesm 5y agoBecause there is a substantial cost to such migrations. If it works don't fix it.
- mastersummoner 5y agoWhile "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is often a perfectly valid approach, there are going to be times when an upgrade can result in significant performance improvements or fewer admin headaches.
- linspace 5y agoDoes anything "just work"? Everything is constantly changing, new features always in demand, more users, more data.
- lazide 5y agoAnd you need to support that for anything you have ON TOP of any migration work - which is huge, and also a similarly moving target
- myohmy 5y agoIf IT is on the value chain this seems insane. If IT is ancillary to the value chain then this is standard.
- vp8989 5y agoYouTube built Vitess, which lets you scale out MySQL writers. If I can scale out both my writers and my readers then what could be "vastly more scalable" than that?
- WJW 5y agoAs far as I can tell, Vitess still has trouble with cross-server transactions and distributed locking. Presumably something "vastly more scalable" could work around this. The Spanner team noticeably put out https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-cloud-spanner-and-the-cap-theorem https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-clou... a few years back, which tl;drs that they managed to get a reliable enough network that partitions don't really happen anymore and so you can get both C _and_ A from the CAP theorem. I don't think that Vitess is quite at that level, especially since you can self-host it and thus the devs don't have such network-level uptime guarantees.
- vp8989 5y agoAre cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to? I am just speculating here but I doubt that YouTube migrated to Spanner so that they could do cross-server transactions. I would think consolidating the Ops burden into the GCP org and also serving as a trophy "customer" were higher on the list of reasons. But again, just speculating...
- derekperkins 5y agoYeah, Google policy was to migrate everything to Spanner, not a technical decision. > Are cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to? As a long time Vitess user and contributor/maintainer, this perfectly describes the issue. Minimal effort has been put into solving cross shard / 2PC transactions because a well designed system rarely needs it.
- ksec 5y agoI guess people from PlanetScale will know. Not sure if they are reading the thread.