Facebook Trapped in MySQL 'Fate Worse Than Death'

I clicked through a bit to get more information... here's a potential definition:

http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management/2011/04/...

“NewSQL” is our shorthand for the various new scalable/high performance SQL database vendors. We have previously referred to these products as ‘ScalableSQL’ to differentiate them from the incumbent relational database products. Since this implies horizontal scalability, which is not necessarily a feature of all the products, we adopted the term ‘NewSQL’ in the new report.

Like noSql, this term also appears to be intentionally broad, indicating a problem to be addressed rather than a very specific spec or solution. I don't have any problem with this, but the ambiguity can cause a lot of confusion...

Are they doing away with the relational model? Or the SQL language itself?

Here's another blurb that may answer this:

"Like NoSQL, NewSQL is used to describe a loosely-affiliated group of companies (ScaleBase has done a good job of identifying, some of the several NewSQL sub-types) but what they have in common is the development of new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity."

Which is great, but is it really new sql? I'm not sure the old relational model or sql language made any specifications or recommendations about how it should be implemented. This might just be an implementation of sql and relational databases that improves performances in distributed systems. Again, a great idea, but is a new implementation of a back-end the same as a "newSql".

I was initially very sceptical about "noSql" until I understood what it really meant (from what I've read, it was a movement away from using rdbms and sql as the default data store for all persistence, and toward a consideration of other persistence frameworks that might be more optimal for the task at hand - hard to find fault with that).

Similarly, "newSql" sounded like something more revolutionary than I'm seeing here. As far as I can tell, this is same old sql, but with a new implementation designed to scale well in distributed systems. Great idea, but not loving the name here.

Does Facebook run and make money? Are users happy? Is it fast?

In general if those three things are good, then why do a rewrite or a massive switch?

Facebook has very smart developers and if they though they could go out and swap out database vendors and get a big gain, I bet they would, but they don't. Why? because I bet the gain isn't as big as advertised.

VoldDB is in-memory so it's fast? Cool, but FB already uses memcached, so you aren't going to get any huge perf wins there. Maybe it would be simpler and maybe if FB started today they might use it, but the cost to swap out their proven architecture for something new and shiny probably doesn't provide a big enough user benefit for it to be worth their time.

At the end of the day, very few companies truly understand what it is like to have half a billion people logging into your website on any given day to chat, send messages, upload photos, play games, and so on. Any platform is going to have problems at that load, swapping databases doesn't solve that at all.