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Yale Researchers Prove That ACID Is Scalable

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-could-prove-lunch dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The has been a lot of buzz in the industry lately about NoSQL databases helping Twitter, Amazon, and Digg scale their transactional workloads. But there has been some recent pushback from database luminaries such as Michael Stonebraker. Now, a couple of researchers at Yale University claim that NoSQL is no longer necessary now that they have scaled traditional ACID compliant database systems."

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I hate SQL and Databases in General... by poet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Spoken with proud ignorance.

    Anyone who has properly scaled an application knows the database isn't the problem. If it was, it wouldn't take 12 applications servers to bring the thing to its knees. That said, most of your gripes equate to:

    I am not a DBA and therefore I do not understand DBA and therefore I must complain.

    Further SQL has nothing to do with ACID. AT ALL!

    --
    Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
  2. Re:Pfah. by Trieuvan · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is if you use innodb .

  3. Re:Pfah. by DragonWriter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Doesn't work so well if you've got a graph structure or a tree. If in a family tree, you want to find all 5'th descendants or all descendants of some guy, SQL won't make you happy.

    A decade plus ago, and that would be true.

    Standard SQL from SQL-99 on will, in fact, do this quite easily with via recursive Common Table Expressions. Now, some SQL-based DBMSs don't support enough of the standard to use this, but, current versions of, I believe, DB2, Firebird, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server all implement standard CTEs well enough to do those examples in SQL fairly directly, and Oracle has its own proprietary syntax (CONNECT BY) that works for the examples that you pose, though its less general than SQL-99 recursive CTEs.

  4. Re:Pfah. by QuoteMstr · · Score: 5, Informative

    An ACID compliant RDBMS can't even get read access to the user, car, friend, picture and pet_survey_answer table set as long as any of the million users of the system is making a change to his data, even if the application only locks one table at a time for write access, let alone the problem of a million users trying to gain write access to the same table at the same time.

    You have no idea what you're talking about, probably because your brain has been irreversibly warped by MySQL. Concurrent writing is widely-supported.

    Hint: MVCC.