

Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’ (2011) - dikbrouwer
http://gigaom.com/2011/07/07/facebook-trapped-in-mysql-fate-worse-than-death/

======
noir_lord
Best figures I could find in a quick search was
[http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57566550-93/facebook-by-
the...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57566550-93/facebook-by-the-
numbers-1.06-billion-monthly-active-users/)

618 million Daily Active Users.

4000 shards, 9000 memcache instances.

Simple math, 618m/4000 is 154000 users per database (this is a horrible metric
but illustrates my point) and 618m/9000 = 68666 and a bit users per memcache
intances.

I hardly think this is a "fate worse than death", When you have a billion
users with 600,000,000 DAU's _whatever technology you use is going to have
snags as you are pushing the envelope in just about every way_.

This article reads like a Microsoft Whitepaper about why only a Microsoft
technology running on a Microsoft platform will solve all your problems.

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SEJeff
Stonebraker is known for posting ridiculous things like this in the SQL/NoSQL
community. Look at the marketing hype for VoltDB for an idea. He also loves to
rag on Riak, which is a pretty solid KV store. This is ridiculous

~~~
pkolaczk
According to this paper:
[http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf](http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf)
VoltDB does not scale anywhere near even MySQL, let alone Cassandra.

Also, full ACID is overrated. Banks do well without it for years.

------
jbyers
(2011)

Previous comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2740432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2740432)

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gregjor
Article is two years old, FB apocalypse hasn't happened.

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anuraj
The sheer fact that FB was able to scale MySQL for their use till now proves
that there is nothing wrong with MySQL. There are few apps of FB scale ever
created. This would mean for most apps, MySQL is more than enough. This is
another snake oil vendor peddling his unproven oil.

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mrbill
Of course the guy pushing an alternative is going to say that FB is doing it
all wrong.

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rgrieselhuber
Anytime an engineer tells me that the only solution to something is to "bite
the bullet and rewrite everything," I lose all respect for them.

~~~
SeanDav
_> "Anytime an engineer tells me that the only solution to something is to
"bite the bullet and rewrite everything," I lose all respect for them" _

Pretty closed minded approach. Just because it is usually not a good idea to
do a rewrite, does not mean it is always true.

Here is an example which indicates you are probably wrong with that type of
thinking:

What happens if a shop decides to store all their data in flat text files
initially because it was easier and they were not expecting it to scale much.
Later on and after huge expansion they realize that flat text files really is
not the best solution, in fact it is pretty much the worst solution and decide
that a rewrite with better technology is needed.

At this point you say you lose all respect for them? Does that attitude make
sense?

~~~
dagw
There's a huge difference between "our web site slow, so let's throw it out
and rewrite the whole thing" and "our web site is slow. after profiling it
seems our main bottleneck is the procedure that writes to these text file. I
did a quick proof of concept where I replaced the text files with postgresql
and I got a 2500% speed up. I'd like to try to implement this on our
production site and see if it solves our performance problems".

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AHconsidered
It's funny because Facebook is actually where Cassandra was born. Now under
the Apache umbrella, it's odd that they didn't even mention it in that
article. It's got by far the most momentum in the distributed database league.

~~~
leef
Except that they have dumped Cassandra and continue to use and grow MySQL and
HBase.

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eksith
Clarke's 1st law comes to mind :

    
    
      When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, 
      he is almost certainly right. 
      When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
    

The other two :

    
    
      2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible 
        is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
      3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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perlpimp
... "running entirely in-memory instead of on disk." ... Yeah one can see
where problems might be. Why not just use the heap instead and have shards
data + code and shard them that way? but then it won't be (R)DBMS would it.

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ExpiredLink
Warning, Stonebraker!

