11–20 of 124 posts
This man's reputation is on the line. I hope they release more details on what exactly it is that is causing the problem. As it stands he appears to be an unfortunate scapegoat.
I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess maybe their anonymous sources inside Digg revealed it? But then we'd hope they'd know if the problem was with the datastore or the implementation.
Reddit runs on Cassandra + PostgreSQL. They use Cassandra as a key/value store and not as the primary database though.
Is there any reason that Cassandra is the focus of this article? It is really silly and irresponsible to peg a nascent project like that without any reasoning or sources. I'm sure something changed besides just a Cassandra rollout, and wasn't Digg using it on v3 too? I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess mayb…
I'm really interested to see what comes of this and what went wrong. It sounds like (from reading his blog) they were making a lot of customizations to Cassandra?
They have made many feature additions to Cassandra. They haven't said much about the details of why they are having trouble. It could be a core Cassandra problem, something they added, or completely unrelated to Cassandra; But the internet doesn't care. It's drama at its finest.
Digg made a big deal about their move to Cassandra (just as Digg's move to Cassandra was used to legitimize Cassandra, and by correlation NoSQL, among a wide range of zealots), going back over a year.
The thing about talking big like that is that it often comes back to bite you in the ass if things don't go well.
If Digg quietly released a new version that worked more reliably and provided a better experience, they would have been in a perfect position to pontificate on technology.
I actually wondered if they were running into issues with Cassandra. I'm not a NoSQL hater - but its still pretty bleeding edge and it always seemed like making it your core db was super risky. arg - really want more insight, maybe Quinn will elaborate now that he's gone.
I don't know but it sounds pretty insane to me to take an unproven, untested beta technology and make it the backbone of your site.
For some reason this reminds me of the "no one has ever been fired for choosing IBM." slogan. I guess maybe there is some truth to it. Seems like new tech needs to start slow on big places, only startups really have the freedom to risk it all.