3 ms·

So let's see. Back of the envelope math time. Let's round to 100 million containers to make the math simpler. 8 bytes for a synthetic primary key. 8 bytes each

So let's see. Back of the envelope math time. Let's round to 100 million containers to make the math simpler. 8 bytes for a synthetic primary key. 8 bytes each also for location and destination, referencing a separate table with information about "places" (e.g. loading docks, port terminals, holds of ships), that should be more than enough distinct IDs to give you as fine-grained location identification as you need. Description, let's say 512 bytes of free text. 8 + 8 + 8 + 512 = 536 bytes, let's say with padding and DB overhead of various kinds we round up to the next power of 2, an even 1kb. 1kb * 100 million is then roughly 100 Gb. Now I am aware of the risk of "why don't they just"-ing, but seriously, nobody else did this math and noticed that the whole database could probably fit on a $15 SD card? No, most likely someone did, and kept their mouth shut, because why blow up a perfectly good grift?

actionfromafar 4y ago
While a good bashing, it's not really relevant, is it? It's about collaboration, not absolute size of the data. This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dsuperice%2333802411 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%...
JohnBooty 4y ago
That would let you describe the current location of each container, right? Presumably we also want to describe a history of locations and events for each container so we're talking a few additional orders of magnitude more storage and complexity. But still, your point 100% stands. We're not talking about something that traditional technologies can't handle. Although to be fair it seems like the blockchain fans are trumpeting the "publicly available ledger" aspect and not the "suitability for Big Data" angle... I'm no blockchain booster, but I don't think anybody is claiming that it outperforms a trad DB.

actionfromafar 4y ago

While a good bashing, it's not really relevant, is it? It's about collaboration, not absolute size of the data. This comment sounds right: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dsuperice%2333802411 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33802411&goto=threads%...

JohnBooty 4y ago

That would let you describe the current location of each container, right? Presumably we also want to describe a history of locations and events for each container so we're talking a few additional orders of magnitude more storage and complexity. But still, your point 100% stands. We're not talking about something that traditional technologies can't handle. Although to be fair it seems like the blockchain fans are trumpeting the "publicly available ledger" aspect and not the "suitability for Big Data" angle... I'm no blockchain booster, but I don't think anybody is claiming that it outperforms a trad DB.