41–50 of 53 posts
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There is always a better solution than Cassandra, until your data will no longer fit on a single server or you actually need guaranteed availability.
Is there no other db that offers guaranteed availability? I remember reading about Discord switching from Cassandra to ScyllaDB I think.
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One wonders if Yelp could just run on a basic Postgres setup. It's not too much data, the data is relatively unimportant and the traffic is modest and mostly from US. How do the setups get so complicated?
About 6 years ago I was brought in as a Azure/operation consultant to help bid on a "project". Basically a sister-company had built a webapp for a client and we where to bid on hosting and migration away from the current fly-by-night hosting partner. The specs called for a Kubernetes cluster and a Cassandra database cluster for production and the same for testing. Everything about this project was presented as being…
I see a small hosted k8s setup with a hosted sql server as a fine app for many things.
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I found this on their tech blog from 2016: https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/08/how-we-scaled-our-a... Whether they really needed cassandra or whether it was just using fancy complicated tech for the sake of it, I couldn't say.
Yeah sounds like they liked it because of the infinitely scalable storage and high write throughput, but don’t really get into if they were having issues with all that on MySQL. Also, they use the term “analytics” a lot, but it seems to be a different use case than typical OLAP workloads since they were serving this data to customers adhoc.
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Transaction in this case is not a database transaction, but a financial transaction (payment). Per payment, probably somewhere in the order of 50-100 database transactions (although Cassandra does not really have transactions of course, interpret this as read/write actions) will be performed in the course of its processing. So that is 1,875,000,000,000 database actions on busy days. Not a DBA, but for our purposes th…
There are three extra zeros here
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About 6 years ago I was brought in as a Azure/operation consultant to help bid on a "project". Basically a sister-company had built a webapp for a client and we where to bid on hosting and migration away from the current fly-by-night hosting partner. The specs called for a Kubernetes cluster and a Cassandra database cluster for production and the same for testing. Everything about this project was presented as being…
Hosted k8s to run a few docker image is almost no extra work and possibly less work than setting up your own docker hosting system. I see a small hosted k8s setup with a hosted sql server as a fine app for many things.
In this case you had a potential zero management environment, truly Cloud as it was meant to be, vs. managing Kubernetes, plus a database. You could go with managed Kubernetes (AKS) and a managed SQLServer, but why take on that cost?
Edit: Even AKS isn't truly zero management, you need to do at least some of the work for the upgrades, so instantly more management, something you need to do, something that adds to the operational cost.
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Yelp was founded 2004, 2004 postgres was different than 2024 postgres and storage and server options werent as powerful as today either. There were half a million restaurants back then or thereabout, and they wanted to store ratings and comments. That is not something you'd be able to put on one single database in 2004. Why didn't they simplify afterward I can't imagine, but I can see how a business directory at that…
Cassandra was initially released in 2008. Back in 2004 I was running larger MySQL databases than yelp has now: https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/yelp-statistics.ht... > That is not something you'd be able to put on one single database in 2004. Sorry, but it was, plenty of companies had much larger databases back then running plain old master slave replication. But even if it wasn't: just don't run it all on o…
I used to work at Yelp, and at least at that time, a big use case of Cassandra was basically for what were essentially materialized views created from log data. At that point in time, MySQL or logs were the "sources of truth", but there were enough transactions going on that it made sense to have things like Cassandra around too for some of the other use cases.
For those that care about how it got corrupted: https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2023/01/rebuilding-a-cassan... > The investigation around the exception revealed that at-least one of the SSTable (Sorted String Table) rows was unordered, which caused the compaction operation to fail. SSTables are immutable files that are always sorted by the primary key This was just... a bug in Cassandra? Is there anyone that can she…
One wonders if Yelp could just run on a basic Postgres setup. It's not too much data, the data is relatively unimportant and the traffic is modest and mostly from US. How do the setups get so complicated?
Yelp: the mafia of restaurant protection rackets. I don't care if they released a free quantum computer or solved world hunger because they're still making a living off harming small businesses. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/can-you-trust-yelp-crowd-fun... https://thehustle.co/botto-bistro-1-star-yelp/ https://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-allege... https://www.wired.com/2010/02/yelp-sued-for-allege…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is always a better solution than Cassandra, until your data will no longer fit on a single server or you actually need guaranteed availability.
Is there no other db that offers guaranteed availability? I remember reading about Discord switching from Cassandra to ScyllaDB I think.