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>with such good json support in the most popular SQL databases Wait, was that the reason people were doing NoSQL? JSON support? I thought it was about sharding

>with such good json support in the most popular SQL databases Wait, was that the reason people were doing NoSQL? JSON support? I thought it was about sharding, write scalability, etc.

rco8786 2y ago
Ah yea the old “web scale” phase. I think everyone’s more or less accepted that very, very few startup-level (or even SMB-level) workloads need more scalability then Postgres/mysql gives. My favorite example is that Twitter used mysql for all tweets, writing ~5k/s 24/7/365, until about 2016ish. Well into being a public company with billions in revenue and 300mm+ MAUs.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  Has everyone accepted that? 3/4 companies in the Bay Area senior software engineer interviews require a System Design interview where they will tell you "what if you had 10m users" and expect a distributed write-heavy sharding answer
  - rco8786 2y ago
    You’re not wrong in the literal sense. But the “inside baseball” of that question is just that it’s a prompt to talk about how you would horizontally scale a system should the need arise. It’s not a prompt to start questioning whether 10mm or 200mm is the specific limit.
  - femiagbabiaka 2y ago
    Well that's the thing. You don't need a NoSQL database to design a data tier that scales to accommodate distributed write-heavy workloads.
    - closeparen 2y ago
      Lots of people were mad that my employer developed a new distributed NoSQL database engine, but it was literally just an API to encapsulate what an application doing "sharded MySQL" would do in its own data tier. A lot of this is a question of framing and storytelling.
solid_fuel 2y ago
Sharding, write scalability, and similar are the technical advantages that can matter at scale (and mattered a lot more before SSDs became so common), but I think for most users the only tangible ?benefit? was the schema less nature.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

>with such good json support in the most popular SQL databases Wait, was that the reason people were doing NoSQL? JSON support? I thought it was about sharding, write scalability, etc.

rco8786 2y ago

Ah yea the old “web scale” phase. I think everyone’s more or less accepted that very, very few startup-level (or even SMB-level) workloads need more scalability then Postgres/mysql gives. My favorite example is that Twitter used mysql for all tweets, writing ~5k/s 24/7/365, until about 2016ish. Well into being a public company with billions in revenue and 300mm+ MAUs.

reducesuffering 2y ago
Has everyone accepted that? 3/4 companies in the Bay Area senior software engineer interviews require a System Design interview where they will tell you "what if you had 10m users" and expect a distributed write-heavy sharding answer
- rco8786 2y ago
  You’re not wrong in the literal sense. But the “inside baseball” of that question is just that it’s a prompt to talk about how you would horizontally scale a system should the need arise. It’s not a prompt to start questioning whether 10mm or 200mm is the specific limit.
- femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  Well that's the thing. You don't need a NoSQL database to design a data tier that scales to accommodate distributed write-heavy workloads.
  - closeparen 2y ago
    Lots of people were mad that my employer developed a new distributed NoSQL database engine, but it was literally just an API to encapsulate what an application doing "sharded MySQL" would do in its own data tier. A lot of this is a question of framing and storytelling.

solid_fuel 2y ago

Sharding, write scalability, and similar are the technical advantages that can matter at scale (and mattered a lot more before SSDs became so common), but I think for most users the only tangible ?benefit? was the schema less nature.

deleted 2y ago

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