Got this email just now. - - - - Hello, We’re contacting you about an ongoing outage with the Mandrill app. This email provides background on what happened and how users are affected, what we’re doing to address the issue, and what’s next for our customers. What happened Mandrill uses a sharded Postgres setup as one of our main datastores. On Sunday, February 3, at 10:30pm EST, 1 of our 5 physical Postgres instances…
If you care about scalability and availability simultaneously, I'm not sure in these modern times why you would use a relational database. When they fail, they fail catastrophically and are difficult to recover, as this failure event (and the never-ending stream of failure events posted to HN) demonstrates. Don't get me wrong--I love relational databases and they are amazing pieces of technology. But they are incredi…
Relational databases are tried and true and we have learned from the failures and have only made the technology better.
There are many use cases from data modeling perspective where a relational db makes more sense than a no sql and you really have to understand the trade offs of consistency and durability too. There will always be a place for both technologies and its not a question of either/or but rather what makes sense for your application in terms of not only system scalability but data scalability.