11 ms·
MySQL at Uber
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881012
- Brysonbw 2y agoThanks
- nateb2022 2y agoI'm not sure if it's just me, but it reads like a significant portion of this blog was written by a LLM.
- Fogest 2y agoKinda does have that tone. Even the cover photo for the blog post has the classic AI generated look.
- lauriswtf 2y ago100% AI for the cover photo. If you look at their other blog posts it looks like Uber eng doesn't care. They use lazy AI generated images (not even decent attempts at it) for all blog post cover images.
- mianos 2y ago"Cover Photo Attribution: The cover photo was generated using OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise."
- majormajor 2y agoLLMs are basically trained to sound like mid-to-senior-mid-level Silicon Valley corporate blog-speak. It would not surprise me at all if Uber PR ran some this through some ghostwriting, I've seen that even at smaller places. Maybe it's even LLM-mediated now.
- echelon 2y ago> At Uber, our MySQL® > stateless services hosted in Kubernetes® > using the JDBC™ protocol > Percona™ > Cadence™ > Docker® > Oracle InnoDB® engine within the mysqld process. We can configure this to use other MySQL engines like Meta RocksDB™. Trademarks that obnoxious are off putting. The audience must not be engineers.
- refactor_master 2y agoIt also kind of reads as a “tldr but cool story bro” for engineers. Really looks like some paperwork had to be filled out.
- charliereese 2y agoRUN IT BACK https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881012
- otteromkram 2y agoHey, how is Uber going to properly promote itself with only one article? puts aluminum foil hat back on
- needusername 2y ago> using the JDBC™ protocol JDBC is not a protocol, JDBC is an API, hence the need for a different JDBC driver per RDBMS. I doubt the author is a developer, I see this misunderstanding often with architects who don’t code.
- piokoch 2y agoThe author is a "Chat GPT operator". Sadly, there is more and more such content hitting Hacker News.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoFunny to read the negativity in here, I had the same impression. Also scaling MySQL is not interesting in 2025, seems outdated
- kamma4434 2y agoKinda relevant as the article won’t really help - what would you use for HA MySQL in a non-Kubernetes setting? Getting automated failovers, deployment of new nodes, and ~50k databases?
- raffraffraff 2y agoHahaha... Not galera! Well kinda. Galera looks like it's an amazing solution, and it can be for careful operators who read the docs, learn the new procedures and ensure that they're running workloads that fit well. It can eliminate the usual HA / replication / failover stuff. But it has the ability to act like a foot-machinegun. Outside kubernetes where you don't have an kubernetes operator that can run the database cluster, spin up nodes and pods, manage volumes etc it's difficult to imagine how you might automate that infrastructure in addition to managing the database cluster, without building a lot of it yourself.
- smueller1234 2y agoWas about to say that we managed upwards of 4k servers worth of MySQL databases (as in 4k baremetal servers worth, not 4k small VMs each having a small MySQL) using "Orchestrator" at Booking.com ten years ago. I checked if it was still kicking before writing this and found that the GitHub repo was archived last year. The next Google hit I find is this article from three days ago: https://www.percona.com/blog/orchestrator-for-managing-mysql-high-availability-using-raft/ https://www.percona.com/blog/orchestrator-for-managing-mysql... Please do some additional research into the state of maintenance of that piece of tech before jumping on it. But it certainly did a lot of powerful things for us back in the day. The automatic promotion of followers was key to our deployment.
- b112 2y agoThat, and patching MySQL in weird ways. I recall something about the filesystem layer being monkeyed with, because "who needs safe writes, it slows things down"
- mianos 2y agoAs it involves multiple steps they use candence-workflow to orchestrate it. You could use it in a non k8s environment. Or something like Prefect.io.
- DeathArrow 2y agoWhy MySQL? Why not Postgres?
- mianos 2y agoFamously covered in this, controversial blog: https://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ Largely truth, some small mistakes. Generally friends don't let friends use Mysql but at scale all the hacks and workarounds actually work.
- wbercx 2y ago> Generally friends don't let friends use Mysql What drives this sentiment?
- WJW 2y agoMySQL used to have some rather dodgy defaults way back and some people haven't touched it for decades and assume it's still like that. Also it got acquired by Oracle at some point and many people just hate Oracle. Finally it is now cool to love Postgres more, or sqlite. MySQL is fine, boring tech that powers a great many companies. There's nothing wrong with choosing it for a new venture, but there's also nothing wrong with another choice. Which RDBMS you use won't be the deciding factor in your success these days.
- cies 2y agoWe're using MySQL and collectively wish we were on Postgres. It's waaaay more quirky in our experience. Also: Oracle hate is not unwarranted, even in this day-and-age. > There's nothing wrong with choosing it for a new venture I'd advise anyone in that position not to choose MySQL. Go with Postgres unless you have a good reason not to.
- gnz11 2y agoMySQL is just fine for most cases. Postgresql has its warts too. Restoring a MySQL db is far simpler and smoother compared to Postgresql IMO for example.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PedroBatista 2y agoNot gonna lie, was expecting something with more substance. Instead I feel I just read a quimera of LLM slop with a homework assignment of some marketing kid trying his/her best to meet the quota.
- mohsen1 2y agoTech blogs demonstrate quality of engineering of a company and this blog post is just doing that. Uber eng org is probably so bloated that nobody really cares about this stuff anymore.
- hansmayer 2y agoHorrible stuff really, half-way through between explaining the basics of MySQL and somehow merging that slop that into describing the architecture they are apparently using (+/- hallucinations).
- duxup 2y agoI don’t get how this submission (and the identical one 17 days ago…) got upvotes, assuming anyone reads the article. And no dup tag, flags?
- martinsnow 2y agoWho signed off on this crap?
- cies 2y agoWe use MySQL. Why? Well, it's hard to switch. And yes I believe Postgres is the better option, for us, and for almost anyone. I was hoping to find some reason for Uber to use MySQL over the other popular FLOSS RDBMS (i.e.: Postgres). For Facebook I more/less know what are their reasons. I was hoping to learn about Uber's reasons, but the article was was not going that deep.
- bagol 2y agohttps://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/
- mathverse 2y agoPreface: not an american Uber offshored some parts of their engineering so all the new-ish blogs fit the stereotypes. Lazy written, LLM generated, by their offshore indian folks. Make of that what you want.
- pverghese 2y agoWithout any proof you have resorted to some blatant racism. Sheesh
- mathverse 2y agoWhat part of that sentence is racist??
- WJW 2y agoThe bit with the implication that only offshore engineers would use LLMs to write blog posts, while the intellectually and morally superior engineers in the US would never stoop to such depths. (Especially hilarious given it's Uber, which obviously could never have engineers doing anything morally dubious ever /s)
- duxup 2y ago> only offshore engineers would use LLMs to write blog posts I don’t see that implication in the original post.
- hansmayer 2y agoWhile I agree a subtle racist undertone is there, perhaps without intention (implying that all off-shored tasks will be done lazily), the more important part is that the article does really read like an LLM-generated slop (perhaps with some editing afterwards). Has all the typical 'markers', such as bloated text and overemphasized structure, etc. with the highlight for me personally being the "conclusion". It is so clear that the first paragraph was spit out by an LLM.
- crazygringo 2y ago> The MySQL fleet at Uber consists of multiple clusters, each with numerous nodes. This is written like unintentional comedy! I'm glad their nodes are so... numerous.
- conradfr 2y agoThe nodes are numerous and important. Please enjoy each one equally.