4 ms·

That almost certainly implies you're not working on anything that requires horizontal scalability. That's a luxury not everyone can afford. Scalability, in almo

by remon 12y ago

That almost certainly implies you're not working on anything that requires horizontal scalability. That's a luxury not everyone can afford. Scalability, in almost all cases that actually require it, is the first priority. It's like saying it's more important that the car drives reliably rather than everyone that needs to travel fitting into the car in the first place.

davidw 12y ago
I think there are probably way too many people out there doing scaling before they're doing "getting things right". It's premature optimization that causes a lot of problems. Naturally, there are plenty of people who do need to scale a lot, too, but presumably by the time they need to, they have a good idea of the problem and exactly how best to scale it.
- remon 12y ago
  That may be generally true but those two things are not mutually exclusive. Scalability doesn't come at the expense of getting things right, it just might come at the expense of certain features which applies to most distributed system problems.
  - CHY872 12y ago
    Vertical scaling can take you a surprisingly long way
- craigching 12y ago
  Choosing MongoDB isn't always about scaling immediately. It can be about ease of use and easy to configure replication. See my post here [1] here about our use case. [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657458
CHY872 12y ago
The point at which you need to scale horizontally is (for most applications) when you hit data scale in terabytes. When this is the case, you probably have enough money to hire someone who knows what they're doing with databases in order to set up a migration properly - you don't really need the ease of use configuration features. SQL databases give data durability and transactions, integrity constraints, joins etc, which makes writing software a simpler experience (with a smaller chance of corrupting your data etc) which is generally a nice property to have when you're a small company that's moving fast and breaking things.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  There are ton of IoT/data analytics startups with data scale in the terabytes that don't have enough money/resources to hire dedicated systems admin.
eddd 12y ago
I currently work with postgres cluster with 16 shards on 4 machines. Overall database size is bigger than a few terabytes. Horizontal scaling with postgres is possible and it works more reliable than mongos. What's more, the exact data in mongo would require a few(dozens) times more disk space - so maybe scaling in mongo is easier, but the way i see it, mongo tries to solve problems that it actually creates.

by remon 12y ago

davidw 12y ago

I think there are probably way too many people out there doing scaling before they're doing "getting things right". It's premature optimization that causes a lot of problems. Naturally, there are plenty of people who do need to scale a lot, too, but presumably by the time they need to, they have a good idea of the problem and exactly how best to scale it.

remon 12y ago
That may be generally true but those two things are not mutually exclusive. Scalability doesn't come at the expense of getting things right, it just might come at the expense of certain features which applies to most distributed system problems.
- CHY872 12y ago
  Vertical scaling can take you a surprisingly long way
craigching 12y ago
Choosing MongoDB isn't always about scaling immediately. It can be about ease of use and easy to configure replication. See my post here [1] here about our use case. [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657458

CHY872 12y ago

The point at which you need to scale horizontally is (for most applications) when you hit data scale in terabytes. When this is the case, you probably have enough money to hire someone who knows what they're doing with databases in order to set up a migration properly - you don't really need the ease of use configuration features. SQL databases give data durability and transactions, integrity constraints, joins etc, which makes writing software a simpler experience (with a smaller chance of corrupting your data etc) which is generally a nice property to have when you're a small company that's moving fast and breaking things.

nemothekid 12y ago
There are ton of IoT/data analytics startups with data scale in the terabytes that don't have enough money/resources to hire dedicated systems admin.

eddd 12y ago

I currently work with postgres cluster with 16 shards on 4 machines. Overall database size is bigger than a few terabytes. Horizontal scaling with postgres is possible and it works more reliable than mongos. What's more, the exact data in mongo would require a few(dozens) times more disk space - so maybe scaling in mongo is easier, but the way i see it, mongo tries to solve problems that it actually creates.