SQL Databases Don't Scale • Hacker News Board

Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale

#31

Post by ebiester » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 7:35 PM UTC

kls wrote: post #25

ebiester wrote: post #10

Isn'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.

Right I feel like some times when someone say relational databases don't scale they mean that free databases don't scale without a lot of work. Scaling with Oracle is fast and easy (in comparison to the alternatives), it is why people still pay that kind of money for it. I personally find Oracle the company distasteful but the facts are the facts and Oracle does scale.

Sometimes I wonder... if three fortune 500 companies just spent the same amount as their Oracle budget on Postgres devs, they could probably have a RAC competitor in three years.

Then, just another billion on transition costs, right? :)

Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale

#32

Post by kls » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #31

kls wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right I feel like some times when someone say relational databases don't scale they mean that free databases don't scale without a lot of work. Scaling with Oracle is fast and easy (in comparison to the alternatives), it is why people still pay that kind of money for it. I personally find Oracle the company distasteful but the facts are the facts and Oracle does scale.

Sometimes I wonder... if three fortune 500 companies just spent the same amount as their Oracle budget on Postgres devs, they could probably have a RAC competitor in three years. Then, just another billion on transition costs, right? :)

I agree, there is no technical reasons that postgres could not be as easy or as good at scaling as Oracle. Someone just has to put the money and effort in.

Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale

#33

Post by gregjor » Mon, Feb 21, 2011, 11:22 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #11

gregjor wrote: post #3

I 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…

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? CICS and TPF on z/OS?

CICS is a transaction processor. TPF and z/OS are operating systems. CICS applications will typically be accessing a relational DBMS such as DB2 or Oracle.

Re: SQL Databases Don't Scale

#34

Post by sophacles » Tue, Feb 22, 2011, 12:57 AM UTC

gregjor wrote: post #33

sophacles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? CICS and TPF on z/OS?

CICS is a transaction processor. TPF and z/OS are operating systems. CICS applications will typically be accessing a relational DBMS such as DB2 or Oracle.

TPF blurs the boundaries between traditional databases and operating system. The OS itself has built-in support for transactions, locking of records, processing of record streams and other database-y things. So while strictly speaking, yes TPF is an OS, it is an OS that is designed to be a database, and would be useless for most other purposes.

Sure code still needs to be run on top of it for specific reasons, but I submit for consideration this is true of SQL databaes, and the data persistence layer of any NoSQL based app.

Similarly CICS may have a relational DB in the loop, or it may be pointing at some sort of TPF based system, or it could be pointing at a simple pile of COBOL records stored in z/VSE. The point is CICS is the transaction manager and provides the interface to the data much the same way an sql layer over a relational DB does.