8 ms·

are you kidding me? There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company. Postgres is more than capable of sustaini

are you kidding me? There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company. Postgres is more than capable of sustaining the necessary speeds of a startup. Relational databases were created in the first place to solve these very problems around transactionality and analytics for finance. This library is a beautiful example of reinventing the wheel, and otherwise creating a patchwork of unnecessary - and ultimately brittle - infrastructure.

rdouble 14y ago
Everywhere I've worked that did high volume transaction processing had an architecture that required a piece like this. Even if you use a relational database for intake, you still need to move the data to another database for analytics. Moving the data automatically via replication sounds a lot better than the typical batch process running at 4am.
gdb 14y ago
(I work at Stripe.) Where we use MongoDB, it's not because of speed. PostgreSQL is certainly capable of fast performance. MongoDB is useful for its ability to log freeform data as well as for its replication model. (We use sharded MongoDB in a few places, but mostly use straight replica sets.) We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala. They're all useful in different places.
- spicyj 14y ago
  Why do you use MySQL over Postgres and vice versa?
- dennis82 14y ago
  > "We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala." Thanks for the clarification, but this makes it even more obvious your engineering team is introducing needless complexity into your organization. Postgres can store unstructured data just fine, so you have a 'solution' that uses 3 OLTP stores instead of one.
  - taligent 14y ago
    PostgreSQL is awful for storing unstructured data. It is the most cumbersome, clunky syntax I've seen for a while and it lacks ORM support meaning you are forced to manually write it. Making developers productive is an important aspect for choosing a database.
    - gfodor 14y ago
      Choosing a data store based upon syntax and slightly limited ORM support isn't exactly a great idea. Both of these things can be improved rapidly with a little code. More important questions are how is the data stored, how is it accessible, how can you scale the system, what operational constraints are there, how fast is it, what types of data modeling can be done, what consistency/transaction guarantees does it provide, etc. These are the things that will make developers productive because they will not be putting out fires all the time.
      - dennis82 14y ago
        well said!
- monstrado 14y ago
  (Clouderan here) How are you liking Impala? We just dropped 0.5 release yesterday which includes the JDBC driver :D! Edit: Awesome job on the Ruby client, it's great!
  - gdb 14y ago
    It's been great -- setup was a bit of work (we're on Ubuntu, so had to build from source), but once up and running it's allowed us to do lots of ad-hoc analysis that would have been too hard otherwise. I've been meaning to write a MoSQL equivalent for our Impala data, but at the moment we're doing a more traditional ETL.
    - monstrado 14y ago
      Awesome! Great to hear it's working out for you guys, looking forward to MoSQL for Impala :-)
    - odellk 14y ago
      gdb - If you have Impala, Hadoop, and Hive right now. Why use MongoDB instead of HBase and make it all work in a happy harmony?
  - nelhage 14y ago
    We've been pretty happy so far. There have been a few rough edges getting it up and keeping it running, but we've been very impressed with the performance so far. I've passed your comment on to Colin, who wrote the Ruby client -- I'm sure he'll appreciate it!
    - monstrado 14y ago
      I got myself a little Impala Herd server setup, pointed it at my Impala cluster and it's working great ;).
      - colinmarc 14y ago
        heh, I didn't think anyone would actually use that - I originally wrote it meaning to use it as a tutorial for the blog post, then scrapped that idea. Thanks for the kind words!
- pvh 14y ago
  Mongo's probably still got the edge as a JSON store overall, but definitely check out the new JSON object dereferencing functionality coming in 9.3. There's a Russian indexing posse consisting of Oleg, Teodor, and Sasha who have been looking at doing proper indexes for JSON but haven't managed to secure funding. (Disclosure: I think they should get funded.) These are the same guys who built hstore, full text search, GIN and GIST indexes and I think are working on a generic regular expression index type right now.
Ingaz 14y ago
Tell this FIS Global. There is absolutely no reason to make banking system on GT.M but they did. Although: GT.M is the only(?) NoSQL that is ACID-compliant.
taligent 14y ago
> There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company Yes there is. PostgreSQL doesn't support multi master replication which makes it a terrible choice if you really want to make sure every transaction gets written. I really wonder at what point people that keep recommending PostgreSQL are going to wake up and realise what is happening in the industry. People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups.
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  In all fairness, you could use something other than Postgres that's also ACID.
- shawn-butler 14y ago
  I'm sorry, postgres-xc doesn't work for you needs? [0] It has worked for me in the past. [0] http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/ http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/
- knightni 14y ago
  I would imagine that for your average startup, using solutions that don't even support transactionality will cause greater complexity issues. Especially given the enormous window before db scale out/up becomes an issue on well-designed applications.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Enormous window ? Many startups would be using AWS and it is not inconceivable that you would have Multi-AZ/Multi-Region VPSs. Scaling out != Expensive.
- j-kidd 14y ago
  > People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups. Startups need to scale out because many of them like to deploy on mediocre EC2 instances with the slowest SAN storage ever. People that keep recommending PostgreSQL are rightfully ignoring this industry.

rdouble 14y ago

Everywhere I've worked that did high volume transaction processing had an architecture that required a piece like this. Even if you use a relational database for intake, you still need to move the data to another database for analytics. Moving the data automatically via replication sounds a lot better than the typical batch process running at 4am.

gdb 14y ago

(I work at Stripe.) Where we use MongoDB, it's not because of speed. PostgreSQL is certainly capable of fast performance. MongoDB is useful for its ability to log freeform data as well as for its replication model. (We use sharded MongoDB in a few places, but mostly use straight replica sets.) We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala. They're all useful in different places.

spicyj 14y ago
Why do you use MySQL over Postgres and vice versa?
dennis82 14y ago
> "We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala." Thanks for the clarification, but this makes it even more obvious your engineering team is introducing needless complexity into your organization. Postgres can store unstructured data just fine, so you have a 'solution' that uses 3 OLTP stores instead of one.
- taligent 14y ago
  PostgreSQL is awful for storing unstructured data. It is the most cumbersome, clunky syntax I've seen for a while and it lacks ORM support meaning you are forced to manually write it. Making developers productive is an important aspect for choosing a database.
  - gfodor 14y ago
    Choosing a data store based upon syntax and slightly limited ORM support isn't exactly a great idea. Both of these things can be improved rapidly with a little code. More important questions are how is the data stored, how is it accessible, how can you scale the system, what operational constraints are there, how fast is it, what types of data modeling can be done, what consistency/transaction guarantees does it provide, etc. These are the things that will make developers productive because they will not be putting out fires all the time.
    - dennis82 14y ago
      well said!
monstrado 14y ago
(Clouderan here) How are you liking Impala? We just dropped 0.5 release yesterday which includes the JDBC driver :D! Edit: Awesome job on the Ruby client, it's great!
- gdb 14y ago
  It's been great -- setup was a bit of work (we're on Ubuntu, so had to build from source), but once up and running it's allowed us to do lots of ad-hoc analysis that would have been too hard otherwise. I've been meaning to write a MoSQL equivalent for our Impala data, but at the moment we're doing a more traditional ETL.
  - monstrado 14y ago
    Awesome! Great to hear it's working out for you guys, looking forward to MoSQL for Impala :-)
  - odellk 14y ago
    gdb - If you have Impala, Hadoop, and Hive right now. Why use MongoDB instead of HBase and make it all work in a happy harmony?
- nelhage 14y ago
  We've been pretty happy so far. There have been a few rough edges getting it up and keeping it running, but we've been very impressed with the performance so far. I've passed your comment on to Colin, who wrote the Ruby client -- I'm sure he'll appreciate it!
  - monstrado 14y ago
    I got myself a little Impala Herd server setup, pointed it at my Impala cluster and it's working great ;).
    - colinmarc 14y ago
      heh, I didn't think anyone would actually use that - I originally wrote it meaning to use it as a tutorial for the blog post, then scrapped that idea. Thanks for the kind words!
pvh 14y ago
Mongo's probably still got the edge as a JSON store overall, but definitely check out the new JSON object dereferencing functionality coming in 9.3. There's a Russian indexing posse consisting of Oleg, Teodor, and Sasha who have been looking at doing proper indexes for JSON but haven't managed to secure funding. (Disclosure: I think they should get funded.) These are the same guys who built hstore, full text search, GIN and GIST indexes and I think are working on a generic regular expression index type right now.

Ingaz 14y ago

Tell this FIS Global. There is absolutely no reason to make banking system on GT.M but they did. Although: GT.M is the only(?) NoSQL that is ACID-compliant.

taligent 14y ago

> There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company Yes there is. PostgreSQL doesn't support multi master replication which makes it a terrible choice if you really want to make sure every transaction gets written. I really wonder at what point people that keep recommending PostgreSQL are going to wake up and realise what is happening in the industry. People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups.

nirvdrum 14y ago
In all fairness, you could use something other than Postgres that's also ACID.
shawn-butler 14y ago
I'm sorry, postgres-xc doesn't work for you needs? [0] It has worked for me in the past. [0] http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/ http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/
knightni 14y ago
I would imagine that for your average startup, using solutions that don't even support transactionality will cause greater complexity issues. Especially given the enormous window before db scale out/up becomes an issue on well-designed applications.
- taligent 14y ago
  Enormous window ? Many startups would be using AWS and it is not inconceivable that you would have Multi-AZ/Multi-Region VPSs. Scaling out != Expensive.
j-kidd 14y ago
> People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups. Startups need to scale out because many of them like to deploy on mediocre EC2 instances with the slowest SAN storage ever. People that keep recommending PostgreSQL are rightfully ignoring this industry.