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Digg Says Yes To NoSQL Cassandra DB, Bye To MySQL
donadony writes "After twitter, now it's Digg who's decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Cassandra, an open source project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database. Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008 and is licensed under the Apache License. The reason for this move, as explained by Digg, is the increasing difficulty of building a high-performance, write-intensive application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead."
Or away from MySQL? There is a difference.
100% of hosting companies do not have twitter, facebook, reddit, or digg as their clients. Its a different market. Mysql does have a competitor in this space called PostgreSQL. Its pretty good. Pretty much every hosting company I would consider doing business with also offers it. But again, PostgreSQL wouldn't have saved the day for these companies, they've reached a different sector of the market due to their enormous scale.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you need a comparison chart... you don't need to switch.
It's probably not necessary to change such a huge part of your architecture if it's not worth investing serious time investigating and benchmarking the alternatives.
These slides present a balanced and comprehensive overview of the current state of free databases. Whether you're in the NoSQL camp or not, they're worth reading.
That said, here's my take:
It's currently fashionable to replace MySQL with some "NoSQL" database or other. This trend is driven by two factors:
I haven't seen any consideration from potential "NoSQL" adopters of the benefits of using a good relational database like PostgreSQL. There's a world of difference between it and MySQL, and condemning all relational database systems because of bad experiences with MySQL is like condemning all sandwiches because McDonalds once made you sick. In giving up RDBMSes entirely, these developers lose quite a bit of safety, flexibility, an convenience. It's a huge over-reaction.
This field should not be about following trends, though unfortunately, that's how most people choose which technologies to use: it should be about choosing the best tool for the job. And I believe that in the vast majority of cases, the advantages conferred by a relational system --- enforced integrity, interoperability based on SQL, query flexibility, storage flexibility --- make an RDBMs the best choice for almost any job. If you need sloppier semantics for some cases (for example, "eventual consistency"), you can layer that on top of a robust RDBMs.
Are you seriously arguing that unless the first derivative of one's salary is positive, there's no incentive to work?
No, I did not say that one's salary needs to be monotonically increasing. That is not the point at all. And did you really have to turn this into a calculus problem?
To state it differently, many entrepreneurs are willing to work temporarily for little or even nothing, and to make great sacrifices such as giving up health benefits, vacations, and normal family/social life... things most 9-5 workers would never consider. Being someone's bitch for $1M/yr (or to be pedantic let's say $1M/yr + 5%/yr^2) may sound like a splendid deal to you but there are others who would work much harder for sweat equity in their own venture.
These people exist even if you can't fathom it. I'm one of them.
Am I the only one who frowns at this moniker?
First, it creates a false premise where people need to pick "SQL" versus "no SQL", while many real-world systems intelligently combine relational and non-relational data storage for their needs. There is no conflict.
Second, there's nothing wrong with SQL as a language in particular, and in fact many of the "noSQL" engines are starting to support and extending basic SQL queries, instead of reinventing their own query language for the same purpose.
I suppose "lessRDBMSabuse" was less catchy...
Bullshit. Languages don't scale: programs do.
Writing a program in Java makes is scalable in the same way that painting a car red makes it fast. The JVM is quite good these days, but don't make up advantages that don't exist.
First of all, if he's asking Slashdot for advice (which is barely a step above reading tea leaves [which itself is a step above asking 4chan]), he doesn't need Facebook-level scalability.
Second, you're confusing scalability and performance. Scalable solutions tend to actually be slower than non-scalable ones: the difference is that a scalable system increases in capacity linearly with the number of machines you throw at it ("horizontal" scalability), whereas a fast non-scalable system generally needs the same number of faster, individual machines to increase capacity ("vertical" scaling).
Third, PostgreSQL has excellent performance, and PostgreSQL does, in fact, scale horizontally.
Java is a whole platform that is scalable. Its not just about using identifiers and objects but using the vast API's. Some would Java is even an OS as it has its own I/O, threads, etc.
I suppose you could write your own threading and processes code but most Java developers just use whats built into the api.
http://saveie6.com/
You have to understand the slashdot memes. These are constructed around the state of technology over a decade ago. So, PHP is always bad, Javascript and Ajax are always bad, and when someone mentions MySQL, the karma whores come out to bash it and mention PostgreSQL. They don't need an argument, the authors and upvoters are operating in old-man auto-bot mode. Like I said, it typically involves notions which were fixed years ago if they did exist to begin with. These are elitist-wannabees, using simple rules of engagement, to show you how smart they are. Similar to grammar nazi. It is actually a quite lower-class thing to do. As Hannibal Lecter would say, you have to wonder if they still hear the lambs screaming.