

Dennis Forbes Responds to Joe Stump on the NoSQL Debate - digitallogic
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Responding_to_Joe_Stump_on_the_NoSQL_Debate/

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Lewisham
My sneaking suspicion about the entire NoSQL "movement" is that it's really
one of cold hard cash.

Almost everyone who has moved to NoSQL did so from... _drum roll_ MySQL. As
Forbes notes, MySQL has problems. Lots of them. It's good enough for most
things (and arguably it wasn't that until version 5), but when you aren't most
businesses, you shouldn't be surprised that the crappy product doesn't cut it.

No-one from the NoSQL crowd ever says "...and then we evaluated it on Oracle,
with a reasonably specced server, and found it performed far worse than
[flavor of the month NoSQL solution]." What's odd is that Digg should be able
to afford Oracle and some decent hardware to run it on. Forbes' assertion that
it might just be a fashion choice seems as good a guess as any.

Neither solution is a religion, and every product has its business case. But
if you're going to make jabs based on technological points, you have to have
properly evaluated the competition.

And, because it never gets old: <http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-
tolerance.png>

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skorgu
One thing that never gets mentioned but that seems important to me is the time
factor of scaling. Say your web 2.0 disruptive foo.com starts out with
whatever tech stack you'd like. The RDBMS upgrade path is several discrete and
large increments from MySQL on a VPS through beefier hardware, read slaves,
Oracle, shared storage, faster SAN, etc. Each one of these steps adds moving
parts and substantial engineering time to get to the next plateau. If you're
scaling predictably that's fine but for a lot of startups the possibility of
having large unpredictable traffic spikes and not a lot of cash in the bank
isn't exactly ridiculous.

Being able to have an ops staff that knows one tech stack (say Cassandra)
means you can upgrade incrementally by adding small amounts of capacity in-
place vs forklift upgrades. If you get featured in $media_outlet you buy more
servers which add to your capacity instead of replacing it.

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jpcx01
Dennis Forbes really seems like the much more rational debater in this
exchange.

I do like reading the back and forth. They both make good points, and this is
an argument with real applicability to help us decide what tech to be using in
the future.

The widespread adoption of cheap SSDs and super fast IO performance is going
to be a huge difference maker.

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daleharvey
can we please stop letting these hit the front page until people write
reasoned articled free from the obvious bias that makes them resemble
playground arguments.

~~~
gill_bates
Does such an article exist? I actually prefer these debates because they don't
pretend to be unbiased. They put their cards on the table.

If someone seems unbiased it just means it hid the bias well, but achieved the
same result.

~~~
blueben
Here's the thing. They don't put their cards on the table. They just bicker,
going tit for tat on every little argument. There is far too little science
being discussed.

~~~
gill_bates
Couldn't agree more.

We need case studies and proposed solutions from both camps, putting them to
real tests.

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mrkurt
You can skip the article and just read this sentence:

"Digg solved their very real I/O issue by essentially pre-caching every
possible query result for a targeted need."

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CoryOndrejka
If anyone is curious about some real-world data with lots of specific details,
Linden Lab published tons of details around their most recent MySQL update
here:
[https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/...](https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/01/11/diary-
of-a-paranoid-mysql-upgrade)

Short version is that currently primary MySQL server now peaks at 11,500
queries per second.

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minalecs
To me the only point that needs to be made, is that all these sites, like
twitter, reddit, and digg, were able to move to a nosql solution like
cassandra at little cost, and this solution was able to handle the loads that
these sites required. Plain and simple there was no need for them to move to
ssd's, or buy their own hardware, or to perfect indexes... the main reason
MySql worked for so many startups is because it was free, and the initial
headaches for scaling the database have already been solved, and we already
know the limitations, no need to figure out how to make it scale at any great
cost. Yeah its probably possible for Dennis Forbes to figure out how to make a
rdbs scale, but does that mean every startup has to hire him.

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oomkiller
I couldn't get past the ALL CAPS RESPONSES THAT ARE ALSO BOLDED. Gimme a
break, it's not that serious.

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skorgu
There's not actually any _content_ in this article. It's just ranting.
Flagged.

