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Startups should use a relational database

raycmorgan.com

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Re: Startups should use a relational database

#51

Post by marcosdumay »

raverbashing wrote: post #47
stiff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a very bad excuse for doing ridiculously shitty systems that stay shitty way after the startup phase. If you at all bother to understand your problem domain, and are not just a monkey at the typewriter, writing down a good domain model and adding the constraints is not going to decrease development speed, quite to the contrary, it's going to increase it, web developers often spend whole workdays just tra…

> If you at all bother to understand your problem domain This is a startup. There is no problem domain. There is no spec. There's none for a startup. You may not even have code. If you're doing a "startup" but have this ironed out, great, everything you said then applies, but it's not a startup, since you found your business model, it's a small company. And I would love to enforce constraints on the DB but unfortunat…

> This is a startup. There is no problem domain.

Is the startup just a game developers do on their free time? Because if it is trying to solve a problem, there is a problem domain, even if it's the wrong problem.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#52

Post by marcosdumay »

robconery wrote: post #9

One thing that could likely get you fired rather quickly is running analytics on your live transactional system. Yes, your business needs to make decisions based on data, this is not terribly new. To think that you only have one data store is a bit short-sighted. Many businesses (including startups) have moved to using document stores for high read environments and scraping nightly drops to their backend analytics sy…

What I don't get about those discussions is why people assume databases that can ONLY do map/reduce are a good thing? SQL is perfectly able to express map/reduce operations, and they main relational databases handle it almost as well as it's possible.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#53

Post by marcosdumay »

HorizonXP wrote: post #19

Serious question: what are NoSQL databases really good for? I'm only really used to relational DBs, and I'm unclear about which problems a NoSQL database is useful for.

When you remove non-local constrains (like foreign keys) you gain scalability, that enables companies like Google to query their data better.

Now, if you are doing anything more mundane (like, for example, logging every bank operation in a country) that's overkill, and non-local constrains are a great thing to have. Thus, I'd advise not using it unless you have a clear necessity.

And always keep in mind that changing yor data is hard, whatever technology you are usig. Relational databases making the change itself hard, while schemaless databases make maintaining the software that reads it hard. Schemaless does give you a small upfront benefit, for a huge cost later.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#54

Post by VLM »

RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Depends what your startup is doing. If you are only using your database to store some basic transactions, then a relational database is a very good fit. This is really the case for most startups tackling common problems. However, if your startup is tackling a problem with unique technical challenges, then you can't just ignore the issue. For example, a geo-location startup tracking the location in real time of users…

Total disagree. The most important job of a startup at startup time is probing the market.

If you have a billion customers each with a million records you are the Google Maps location thingy and are not a startup anymore and a relational solution may, or may not, work.

If you have ten users the ideal database is probably ten interns and some whiteboards. I'm not kidding.

I observe there is a common claim brought up every week on HN about fake it till you make it. You don't automate (insert menial task here) until you have ten customers.

I observe there is another common claim brought up every week on HN about how you need a massively scalable design which can never change from day one, because your schema, either formal or informal, is perfect and unchanging, LOL.

Those two stylistic outlooks are not compatible.

Start with something that has too many features, too many abilities, too much room for expansion, like a relational DB, and then later on if you need to, put some stuff on another platform. IF you need to. IF your company survives. Lots of IF.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#55

Post by VLM »

There can only be one DB much like the LOTR can only have one ring. Why? Thats the only area the linked article falls down on. Its a pretty good article other than that.

So you properly normalized your entire system, customer billing transaction records all the way up to article tags. Then article tags gets too huge. So next version looks at RDBMS and Redis, and the next version after that only looks at Redis. Customer billing transactions remains on a "real" DB and the tag cloud lives on redis. And the problem with that is... what exactly?

Its obsolete thinking. I can't have two databases because we're a poor startup and the only databases that exist are DB2 and Oracle and everyone knows they're super expensive so super expensive times two is unaffordable. Dude, its almost 2014 not 1980, Postgres/mysql/redis its all free.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#56

Post by VLM »

HorizonXP wrote: post #19

Serious question: what are NoSQL databases really good for? I'm only really used to relational DBs, and I'm unclear about which problems a NoSQL database is useful for.

Via analogy:

RDBMS = swiss army chainsaw, can do anything although maybe painfully and slowly.

NoSQL = 5/16th inch torque pre-set wrench for tightening sma connectors to 10 inch-lbs torque. Can't do much else, but its near perfect at its tiny little area of expertise.

On a meta level its a battle between hardware and applications, where app demands have (momentarily, of course) fallen behind commodity hardware ability.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#57

Post by VLM »

nostromo wrote: post #12
robconery wrote: post #9

One thing that could likely get you fired rather quickly is running analytics on your live transactional system. Yes, your business needs to make decisions based on data, this is not terribly new. To think that you only have one data store is a bit short-sighted. Many businesses (including startups) have moved to using document stores for high read environments and scraping nightly drops to their backend analytics sy…

The disconnect between your comment and the article is the term "startup" now means giant companies like Airbnb and tiny two person companies that haven't yet created an MVP. I think this article is targeted at the latter: pre-MVP and just post-MVP. For those startups, having two databases with one dedicated to a backend analytics system reeks of premature optimization.

"having two databases with one dedicated to a backend analytics system reeks of premature optimization."

Its free software, you don't have to pay for two instances of Oracle.

One thing that will quickly kill a biz is combining the functions of PROD and DEV/TEST. Making the DEV/TEST box the DEV/TEST/REPORTS box is not a big deal, and you can't run a (real) biz without a DEV/TEST box.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#58

Post by RyanZAG »

VLM wrote: post #54
RyanZAG wrote: post #4

Depends what your startup is doing. If you are only using your database to store some basic transactions, then a relational database is a very good fit. This is really the case for most startups tackling common problems. However, if your startup is tackling a problem with unique technical challenges, then you can't just ignore the issue. For example, a geo-location startup tracking the location in real time of users…

Total disagree. The most important job of a startup at startup time is probing the market. If you have a billion customers each with a million records you are the Google Maps location thingy and are not a startup anymore and a relational solution may, or may not, work. If you have ten users the ideal database is probably ten interns and some whiteboards. I'm not kidding. I observe there is a common claim brought up e…

Fake it till you make it is why you'd use a quick and dirty mongodb with json dumped straight from your clients, though. Maybe we have different ideas on the speed of development on mysql vs mongodb though.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#59

Post by vidarh »

nostromo wrote: post #12
robconery wrote: post #9

One thing that could likely get you fired rather quickly is running analytics on your live transactional system. Yes, your business needs to make decisions based on data, this is not terribly new. To think that you only have one data store is a bit short-sighted. Many businesses (including startups) have moved to using document stores for high read environments and scraping nightly drops to their backend analytics sy…

The disconnect between your comment and the article is the term "startup" now means giant companies like Airbnb and tiny two person companies that haven't yet created an MVP. I think this article is targeted at the latter: pre-MVP and just post-MVP. For those startups, having two databases with one dedicated to a backend analytics system reeks of premature optimization.

Think of it this way: You really ought to have a failove/disaster recovery copy of your database, and an easy way of making offsite backups.

Set up a slave of your MySQL or Postgres database (no the slave is not a backup, but dumping it regularly is an easy first step to a very basic backup setup), hosted in a different data centre, and if you're a two person company you now also have somewhere to run analytics whenever you feel ready.

It can be <1 hour effort and a few tens of dollars a month in extra costs for a small system, yet makes a tremendous difference in resilience and gives you that db to run analytics against "for free" whenever you do need it.

Re: Startups should use a relational database

#60

Post by Gulthor »

People too often forget about graph databases when talking about NoSQL solutions. Graph databases offer an interesting and elegant alternative to relational databases and I could definitely see a startup decide to use this kind of technology.

As far as I know, most graph databases support transactions and offer great scalability. Such databases are also schema-less and can be queried with Gremlin, a powerful graph traversal language (see www.tinkerpop.com).

With respect to scalability and transactions, Titan (http://thinkaurelius.com/) looks very promising: it supports various backends for storage (Cassandra, HBase, etc.) and indexing (currently Elastic Search and Lucene). Graph analytics can be done via Faunus (http://thinkaurelius.github.io/faunus/), backed by Hadoop.

There are other vendors out there (Neo4J, OrientDB, etc.) which offer interesting solutions worth looking at - I'm just a bit less familiar with them.

The major downside I see with graph databases is that most of them are fairly recent and their ecosystem is tiny (though growing). Should a startup venture on such young technologies, or stick to mature and battle-tested solutions (ie. relational databases)?

Could startups use this kind of graph "NoSQL" databases? I don't see why not. If your startup is some kind of social network, graph databases are certainly an option worth considering. If I were to create a startup, I'd hardly use a document database like MongoDB but I will really consider using a graph database. In the end, it's all about having the right tool in hand, and knowing how to assert what is "right" for you.

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