3 ms·
A relational database at very modest hardware can handle millions of rows, and with a solid database, good hardware and a DBA who knows his shit you can handle
by jeltz 14y ago
A relational database at very modest hardware can handle millions of rows, and with a solid database, good hardware and a DBA who knows his shit you can handle billions.
OpenStreetMap has over a billion nodes stored in a PostgreSQL database.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/stats/data_stats.html http://www.openstreetmap.org/stats/data_stats.html
My point is that you can get very far with a classic relational database before you have to scale vertically.
- einhverfr 14y agoBillions of rows btw is not a problem even on modest hardware, with a half-decent db, etc. It's analytics on this where it become possibly an issue. Retrieving one row out of 1 billion is not that much more complex than retrieving one row out of 1 million, nor is it that much more expensive computationally assuming the right index is in place. The problem comes with high concurrency, in particular very high write concurrency, or with very complex queries which require a lot of RAM to do properly. But that's where you need a solid db, good hardware, and a solid DBA.
- jeltz 14y agoVery true. If you do not do much with your data it is trivial to handle.