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I was in a system design interview where the interviewer didn't like that I chose MySQL for storage, because it doesn't scale. I pointed that I literally used t
by itake 4y ago
I was in a system design interview where the interviewer didn't like that I chose MySQL for storage, because it doesn't scale. I pointed that I literally used to work at a b2c app in this exact problem space that exclusively used MySQL storage. I haven't heard back yet from the company and its been 2 weeks :-/.
- ransom1538 4y ago"MySQL for storage, because it doesn't scale" haha.
- sofixa 4y agoYou should tell them about Facebook, YouTube and GitHub, on top of your own personal experience (which might be harder to verify).
- itake 4y agoI mentioned Facebook. The problem was about storing product reviews and I literally used to work at Yelp, which exclusively uses MySQL for the primary database. My current job also includes product reviews and I am very familiar with how low traffic review systems are. MySQL can definitely handle 10qps writes.
- danpalmer 4y agoWell MySQL scales in much the same way that SQLite does – if you build sufficient tooling around it, you can scale it as much as you like. MySQL comes with a bunch more built-in that SQLite does, but Facebook and GitHub aren't scaling purely with the built-in functionality, they're writing their applications to be sharding-aware, they're writing custom proxies, they're running custom extensions, they're picking and choosing which bits of core functionality they allow in order to minimise scaling issues. I think in a systems design interview these issues need to be addressed, to show that you have the skills to be able to implement this, and I think that a good interviewer should be open to this discussion!
- derekperkins 4y agoGitHub is using Vitess internally to avoid applications needing to be shard aware
- richbell 4y ago> because it doesn't scale Did they give an example of a database that "scales"?
- nolevels 4y agoThat's unfortunate. I hate system design interviews where the interviewer has a "known" solution in mind and won't accept any other solutions even with good arguments, but you could have dodged a bullet if they are completely stubborn to work with.
- phendrenad2 4y agoPlease leave a Glassdoor review so the world knows that their tech leads are clueless.