SQL Databases Don't Scale
adam.heroku.com
SQL Databases Don't Scale
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#2Is this why Google developed BigTable? Have other companies developed their own BigTable-like solutions?
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#3I can't count how many Rails fanboys have written this same article. What do they think big companies, banks, government agencies -- organizations with huge databases -- use? What kind of database do the RoR developers think the real world runs on?
Claiming that SQL databases don't scale, especially using MySQL as the example, is simply ignorant. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server all scale to handle databases orders of magnitude bigger than anything the most successful RoR app is running.
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#4I think TFA gets it all wrong.
It's not that SQL databases do not scale per se, they just can't arbitrarily scale.
Most applications today manage pretty well with nothing more than sharding and replication. Sure, it's not the optimal solution, and it's not easy - but it gets the job done.
Facebook, at the very core (behind all the layers of cache), run, arguably, the largest MySQL landscape in the world - and they seem to be doing pretty good.
Until Heroku comes up with a better solution (or a better question), TFA is no more than flamebait.
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#5(2009)
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#6Can we please stop with these ridiculous "SQL is utterly hopeless" and SQL vs NoSQL articles? Saying that SQL is not scalable, full stop, is ignoring decades of real-world evidence. There's a right tool for every job, and SQL isn't always that tool, but articles like this aren't helpful in the slightest.
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#7Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#8MySpace uses SQL. If that isn't a vote for SQL scalability then I don't know what is.
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#9I can't count how many Rails fanboys have written this same article. What do they think big companies, banks, government agencies -- organizations with huge databases -- use? What kind of database do the RoR developers think the real world runs on? Claiming that SQL databases don't scale, especially using MySQL as the example, is simply ignorant. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server all scale to handle databases orders of magnitu…
Well, they don't scale indefinitely, and you do run in to Brewers Theorem at some point. While you're right in saying that if you have enough cash and horsepower to throw at SQL databases you can get a very long way, there is some point where anything which must be consistent is going to have an impact on availability.
This gets especially critical once you stop assuming that data can be centralised. Once your required transactional context needs to scale large areas (geographically or logically) then the overhead of this is mighty. 2PC itself does not scale indefinitely, and while interesting research is being done in alternative transactional approaches, it would be tough to argue that any are acceptable solutions to the problem.
Also your example of banks is perhaps not an ideal one. While banks may indeed run some very large databases, they don't run one HUGE database which is expected to be always consistent. Things like ATM systems etc. run based on eventual consistency and tolerance favouring availability precisely because a simple horespower approach to a transactional database (whether SQL or not) wouldn't currently work in this domain.
Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale
#10Isn't that what Oracle RAC is for? If you are managing that much data, and you don't want to go the specialty DB route (nosql, for example) RAC scales.
It's also hellishly complicated, but so is the problem.