

Getting Rid of RDBMs - dedalus
http://www.productionscale.com/home/2007/8/11/getting-rid-of-the-relational-database.html

======
neilc
What a terrible article. Leaving aside the grammar and spelling mistakes, the
quote from Stonebraker is taken _completely_ out of context (in the interview,
he is talking about the architecture of systems for doing algorithmic trading,
not relational databases in general: latency is indeed critical for
algorithmic trading, but far less so for typical database applications and web
apps). Then there are content-free statements like:

"This means you should be paying attention to your code quality, optimization
... There are built in limitations as dictated by clear and proven underlying
mechanisms that prohibit current modern database and application technology
from scaling much further."

More broadly, I don't agree with the idea that if something makes sense for
the Amazons and Googles of the world, it should be adopted for run-of-the-mill
web applications. Amazon and Google can afford to write tons of infrastructure
from scratch and hand-tune it to match their performance and scalability
requirements; the typical web app developer cannot, but then again, the
typical web app has totally different requirements. Simply generalizing from
the top end of the cost vs. scalability tradeoff downward doesn't make a lot
of sense. Doing joins and referential integrity in the application layer has
real costs -- discarding 30 years of technology overnight has real tradeoffs
that the article doesn't even bother considering.

The article does have one redeeming feature: the linked-to interview with
Stonebraker and Margo Seltzer is worth reading.
[http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1260000/1255430/p16-stanik.h...](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1260000/1255430/p16-stanik.htm?key1=1255430&key2=3880943811&coll=&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618)

------
tx
The question remains in the air: how do I perform more complex queries without
SQL? The proposed distributed hash table won't do it.

The article mentioned eBay's scaling PDF offering a link at the bottom. I
followed the link read every page of that PDF and have not found any evidence
of them abandoning (or minimizing use of) RDBMS. eBay still runs Oracle, but
uses in-house built index for listings search, but that's hardly a solution
for general problem of running queries more complex than SELECT * FROM Foo
WHERE ID=n. Besides _NOBODY_ uses SQL to do complex full-text searches, even
small companies I worked for. We used Lucene.

I would love to have a "distributed SQL": scaled-out SQL server in proper
sense of the word, capable of running complex SQL queries on distributed sets
of data. Hopefully by the time we grow to eBay size someone will innovate in
that regard. Or, perhaps, it exists already?

------
corentin
I don't get it. I don't design systems including databases, so I may not be
qualified to speak (I've studied information system design a bit, though).
What's wrong with relational theory and Codd normalization rules? It looks
like a good way to organize data and keep it coherent. Just because it's 30+
years old isn't a reason to reject it!

