
Why CouchDB doesn't scale - jorgeortiz85
http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/12/couchdb-not-drinking-kool-aid.html
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edrtghuj
>The reason PostgreSQL et al have those features is because people want them.

The reason those features are in PostgresSQL is because they are in SQLserver,
... because they are in Oracle, ... because they are in DB2.

Based on that logic C should have had a report generator and the unix
filesystem should have records - and your car would have a saddle and whip
holder.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Only those cheap imports don't have whip holders.

Otherwise, your contention in-domain feature copying somehow translates to
cross-domain feature transfer is something that I fail to understand. Can you
explain it better?

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edrtghuj
Postgress has certain features because it is competing, both technically and
in marketing check-boxes, with other SQL databases. CouchDB is not an SQL DB
(and not even an RDMS) and so doesn't automatically have to have the same rich
set of features.

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bitdiddle
Wasn't this posted and discussed some time ago? It is somewhat dated, and the
arguments weren't very convincing, in fact they struck me as typical marketing
FUD.

Sure the Postgres folks have years of experience and so forth but it's not
like the literature is not available to be incorporated in new approaches.
CouchDB hits a certain sweet spot in combining a few new ideas together and
the folks hacking it are some of the best. I highly recommend giving it a hard
look.

I also hear that the canonical folks will be bundling it in an upcoming Ubuntu
release so it will be easier than ever to check it out

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Confusion
If you see how long it took for MySQL to get features like views and stored
procedures, which I consider pretty much indispensable, then warning people
that something like CouchDB is far from being mature is hardly FUD. The worst
thing is: the cool crowd doesn't even know what they are missing. It's like
talking to someone using MySQL 7 years ago: they'd be all enthusiastic, not
understanding why you would worry about the absense of mundane things like
views or, god forbid, the ability to use multiple indices per table in a
query...

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evgen
> The worst thing is: the cool crowd doesn't even know what they are missing.

Actually, they do. A lot of the people interested in and writing code for
these new databases are the ones who have seen first-hand the failures of the
traditional DBA view of the world. If you look at where a lot of these
projects are coming from and who are sponsoring them you will see that they
are some of the companies that are at the leading edge of internet scaling and
deployment. The advantage they have which you seem to ignore is that they can
look back at the wrong turns in the development of the current crop of RDBMS
and avoid those particular dead-ends.

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michaelneale
Yes ! I would totally fit in that camp of many many years experience with
RDBMSes and DBAs. Things like CouchDB are a sight for old sore eyes.

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kscaldef
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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chibea
Not talking about immutability at all when talking about CouchDB's
(potential?) scaling ability is odd.

Even if immutability in DBs was no innovation from CouchDB itself, CouchDB
will have raised the level of awareness for immutable DBs and probably drive
further development in this area. IMO immutability is the very basis of
creating scalable applications. So, when talking about CouchDB and scalability
you should talk about why the current CouchDB implementation is not scalable
_in spite_ of immutability.

Disclaimer: I've only read about CouchDB and never actually used it. I'm not
convinced of every feature of CouchDB, I don't think, for example, that it is
a good approach to dump type-safety in dbs altogether, though, SQL and RDBMS
are not the last word in databases and it is valueable to test other, new
models of data storage.

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jrockway
CouchDB doesn't scale, but not for any of the reasons the author of this
article lists. I especially like meaningless sentences like, "just like PHP
programmers don't get namespaces." While true, it's not "just like" that.

