"They measure how things work in operation. They can monitor at subsecond levels so they catch problems.". Genius!
MySQL at Facebook
41–42 of 42 posts
Re: MySQL at Facebook
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They switch the the biggest machine IBM can give them every few month. Yea, almost all this "web scale" scalability can achieve those numbers because they can partition, relax transactional requirements, and scale out. For system-wide true transactions, scaling up is still the only option, it seems. Although, H-Store/VoltDB claims some impressive numbers if your OLTP app fits the requirements.
Just curious, do you have any good examples of very large scale systems that need system-wide transactions? I might miss something obvious (I'm not actually in the database area), but I couldn't come up with a good example.
I'd guess that in Amazon and other online retailers, the part that completes the order of the item from the warehouse has to be transactional so two customers won't buy the last item.
Normally, whenever physical objects or money is involved, transactions should be considered.