Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
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Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#2I find this answer incredibly excellent.
particularly:
You can actually get pretty far on a single MySQL database and not even have to worry about partitioning at the application level. You can "scale up" to a machine with lots of cores and tons of ram, plus a replica. If you have a layer of memcached servers in front of the databases (which are easy to scale out) then the database basically only has to worry about writes. You can also use S3 or some other distributed hash table to take the largest objects out of rows in the database. There's no need to burden yourself with making a system scale more than 10x further than it needs to, as long as you're confident that you'll be able to scale it as you grow.
I've dealt with some insanely convoluted legacy systems that were made up of a fragile bunch of badly configured clusters ("for scalability!") that I improved the speed and load beariness by 100000x simply by putting it on a single server, tons of ram, and combing through the slow query log.
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#3better yet, why isn't Quora using PostgreSQL? :)
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#4I find this answer incredibly excellent. particularly: You can actually get pretty far on a single MySQL database and not even have to worry about partitioning at the application level. You can "scale up" to a machine with lots of cores and tons of ram, plus a replica. If you have a layer of memcached servers in front of the databases (which are easy to scale out) then the database basically only has to worry about w…
Sounds like pre-mature optimization, a bad idea which hackers need to be constantly reminded of.
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#5I find this answer incredibly excellent. particularly: You can actually get pretty far on a single MySQL database and not even have to worry about partitioning at the application level. You can "scale up" to a machine with lots of cores and tons of ram, plus a replica. If you have a layer of memcached servers in front of the databases (which are easy to scale out) then the database basically only has to worry about w…
Sounds like pre-mature optimization, a bad idea which hackers need to be constantly reminded of.
yes that's exactly what it was.
it was outsourced to a vendor that pretty much took advantage of the contracting startup's lack of DB knowledge. so they got the kitchen sink and a fat invoice.
of course it's easy for the vendor to defend this - "what, we want you to be scalable!".
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#6It's a site with in the ballpark of 60k uniques per month. What they use is pretty irrelevant. Really all this reduces to is, "it's dumb to optimize for problems you don't have."
Assuming 100 requests per user per month, 60k uniques is 2 requests per second. They could run the whole site on one Linode unless they've got a particularly bad architecture.
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#7I find this answer incredibly excellent. particularly: You can actually get pretty far on a single MySQL database and not even have to worry about partitioning at the application level. You can "scale up" to a machine with lots of cores and tons of ram, plus a replica. If you have a layer of memcached servers in front of the databases (which are easy to scale out) then the database basically only has to worry about w…
Sounds like pre-mature optimization, a bad idea which hackers need to be constantly reminded of.
It's pre-mature scalability, where noob web developers are fond of, thinking they are in the big league with tons of traffic.
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#8[deleted]
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#9It's a site with in the ballpark of 60k uniques per month. What they use is pretty irrelevant. Really all this reduces to is, "it's dumb to optimize for problems you don't have." Assuming 100 requests per user per month, 60k uniques is 2 requests per second. They could run the whole site on one Linode unless they've got a particularly bad architecture.
> 2 requests per second
Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.
Re: Why Quora uses MySQL rather than No-SQL
#10It's a site with in the ballpark of 60k uniques per month. What they use is pretty irrelevant. Really all this reduces to is, "it's dumb to optimize for problems you don't have." Assuming 100 requests per user per month, 60k uniques is 2 requests per second. They could run the whole site on one Linode unless they've got a particularly bad architecture.
> 2 requests per second Your point is valid, but it doesn't work like that.
Do you care to elaborate?