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Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#61
Perhaps it's due to me being in the PostgreSQL camp, but what happened to MariaDB? I was convinced that's where MySQL developers went and that's where development proceeded, while MySQL was just half dead, because Oracle did not care about it.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one could dream of the remote possibility that Facebook outright acquires Oracle. It seems like a weird match, but it'd give FB a toehold in a lot of verticals that it currently has no presence in. Whatever criticisms you have of FB, it's at least a pretty open source friendly company.

What would happen to Oracle's infamous legal department then?

Then they'd leverage social media oversharing to find more targets to litigate - it'd be a win-win! /s

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one could dream of the remote possibility that Facebook outright acquires Oracle. It seems like a weird match, but it'd give FB a toehold in a lot of verticals that it currently has no presence in. Whatever criticisms you have of FB, it's at least a pretty open source friendly company.

What would happen to Oracle's infamous legal department then?

You mean pretty much the whole company? /s

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#64
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one could dream of the remote possibility that Facebook outright acquires Oracle. It seems like a weird match, but it'd give FB a toehold in a lot of verticals that it currently has no presence in. Whatever criticisms you have of FB, it's at least a pretty open source friendly company.

What would happen to Oracle's infamous legal department then?

Fabulously lavish retirements?

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the comments in this article very accurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149 > ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software. > Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely. > They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem. > ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a…

This is such a hilariously myopic HN take.

I work for a government agency in a rather poor flyover state. We ran Oracle databases and a few other products for multiple decades, until Oracle conducted an audit and decided to shake us down for everything we were worth. We migrated away from their products, but only after being forced into expensive multi-year subscriptions for products that we didn't need.

I will never forget the arrogance and greed of their legal/sales people. They are bloodsucking sociopaths.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#66
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?

Because there is a substantial cost to such migrations. If it works don't fix it.

While "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is often a perfectly valid approach, there are going to be times when an upgrade can result in significant performance improvements or fewer admin headaches.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#67
post #56
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?

YouTube built Vitess, which lets you scale out MySQL writers. If I can scale out both my writers and my readers then what could be "vastly more scalable" than that?

As far as I can tell, Vitess still has trouble with cross-server transactions and distributed locking. Presumably something "vastly more scalable" could work around this.

The Spanner team noticeably put out https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-clou... a few years back, which tl;drs that they managed to get a reliable enough network that partitions don't really happen anymore and so you can get both C _and_ A from the CAP theorem. I don't think that Vitess is quite at that level, especially since you can self-host it and thus the devs don't have such network-level uptime guarantees.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#68

My old-man brain still can't compute this statement: "MySQL, an open source database developed by Oracle" . I know this is now factually true, but late-90s me keeps looking over my shoulder and freaking out.

I had the same reaction! I was like, “technically, yes, but…”

I haven’t thought about MySQL proper in years, but it is interesting Facebook is moving to MySQL 8 rather than going to MariaDB, which as far as I know, had MyRocks built-in.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#69
post #51
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always see people asking about this. But why? Are you making schema changes that frequently?

It's my opinion that schema changes should be cheap, fast and unexciting. Unfortunately, in my experience once you are operating at scale they are expensive, slow and fraught with peril. The result is that engineering teams often chose to build poorly designed schemas and take on technical debt rather than make a schema change to a core table. This is a terrible anti-pattern! I'm massively in favour of anything that…

Before Twitter migrated off their MySQL user database there were many columns that had been repurposed for exactly this reason.

Re: Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

#70
post #56
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?

YouTube built Vitess, which lets you scale out MySQL writers. If I can scale out both my writers and my readers then what could be "vastly more scalable" than that?

Spanner paper:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

It is designed from the ground-up to be globally distributed. Some other databases like FoundationDB (now owned and killed? by Apple) and CockroachDB were designed to scale across multiple datacenters.

Correction: FoundationDB is alive as open-source again, yay!

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