

BigTable and Why it Changes Everything - edw519
http://jetfar.com/bigtable-and-why-it-changes-everything/

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tx
How old is the blogger? You've got to be 11 holding "Python in 21 days" to
claim that multi-dimensional map is an "alternative" to RDBMS.

Besides, how reliable is that infrastructure? There is only one customer in
the world who's running it - Google themselves. And judging by how often
google maps falls apart and properly loads only about 80% of regions, and by
gmail that loses my labels (and takes up to 20 seconds to send a message
sometimes), it makes me scared to think that airline reservations, banking
translations, stock exchange or social security system may be ran by one of
these dudes when they grow up.

Before one starts drooling over words like "distributed", "transactional" and
"multi-dimensional", he should ask himself: _"How many terabytes of data am I
going to store?"_ Sometimes this simple question makes one to rethink his
definition of "everything" and flat text files may instantly gain an ability
to to change "it".

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ra
I think the point here is that persistent storage is evolving.

RDBMS are fine for just about any task you can throw at them, but then so is
Perl. However, neither is usually going to be the best solution.

What is implied is that RDBMS have inherent complications not due to volumes
of data, but rather due to to complexities of using them (both from a sys
admin, and developer point of view) particularly when HA is required.

I, for one, look forward to a more loosely typed flexible persistence layer
than RDBMS however it may come.

BTW: Any form of data persistence is an alternative to an RDBMS!?

