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."

Comments

Facebook, Twitter and now Digg

[clarkkent09]

In other news, Cassandra developers are celebrating the fact that their database is now used to store the largest amount of worthless information in history.

Re:Facebook, Twitter and now Digg

[seanadams.com]

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.

New acronym in order?

[mgkimsal2]

From the Digg blog - http://about.digg.com/node/564

"And if that doesn't sound like a big enough challenge, we're replacing most of our infrastructure components and moving away from LAMP."

Cassandra Linux Apache PHP?

Re:Which DB is better?

[h4rr4r]

Postgres, for people who care about their data.

Re:Reddit

[h4rr4r]

I was not aware metallurgy was popular amongst the youth.

Allergic reaction to MySQL

[QuoteMstr]

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:

• MySQL's community is fragmenting into several forks as Oracle purchases the rights, which created the impression that MySQL's development is entering a riskier, unstable period.
• "NoSQL" is the technology buzzword du jour in the Bay Area. It's difficult to overstate the impact of social forces on technology choice: most technology selections are governed more by what our friends say than by an impartial and disinterested weighing of merits.

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.

Re:Allergic reaction to MySQL

[jrumney]

I haven't seen any consideration from potential "NoSQL" adopters of the benefits of using a good relational database like PostgreSQL.

The adopters of NoSQL deal with huge volumes of worthless information. They don't care about transactional integrity as much as they care about performance, which is why they chose MySQL over a good relational database in the first place.

Re:Allergic reaction to MySQL

[jbellis]

Teradata and the other big relational db products (vertical, greenplum, etc) are all _analytical_ databases, designed for small amounts of complex queries, where adding new data to the system takes minutes if not hours. They are completely unsuitable for running a live application against.

Re:Which DB is better?

[RelliK]

Go with PostgreSQL. Reliable, standards-compliant, fast.

"NoSQL"?

[Stan Vassilev]

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...

Re:Which DB is better?

[alexkorban]

I have worked with large PostgreSQL databases (150GB or so) and really, Postgres isn't a solution. You run into issues anyway when some of your tables contain millions or even billions of rows. At that stage things like vacuuming or altering the schema start to become damn near impossible, and even querying starts to become a bottleneck.

Now how do you scale that if your database is still growing? Postgres doesn't have a decent clustering solution that I know of, so your options are either to roll your own, or to scale vertically. Both of those are expensive options.

Based on my experience, I don't think that relational databases are appropriate for really large databases, and at present the only realistic option is horizontal scaling which is a lot easier with things like Cassandra or MongoDB.

Re:The Monty crowd will blame this on Oracle

[PietjeJantje]

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.