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Horizontal Scaling of SQL Databases?

Posted by timothy on from the side-to-side dept.

still_sick writes "I'm currently responsible for operations at a software-as-a-service startup, and we're increasingly hitting limitations in what we can do with relational databases. We've been looking at various NoSQL stores and I've been following Adrian Cockcroft's blog at Netflix which compares the various options. I was intrigued by the most recent entry, about Translattice, which purports to provide many of the same scaling advantages for SQL databases. Is this even possible given the CAP theorem? Is anyone using a system like this in production?"

4 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. What limitations are you running into? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It would be a lot easier to talk about solutions if you said which limitations you run into.

    Is your dataset to large (large tables), are you having to much joins, too many transactions per second? In short, what is the problem we're trying to solve here?

  2. Relational stuff scales by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Learn partitioning principles, get a database product that does partitioning properly, learn normalization, never worry again about not being able to scale with relational databases. It just requires some real skills but relational databases really do scale all the way up.

  3. Call me skeptical by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Call me skeptical but there are companies out there with massive amounts of data in relational databases, if you as a setup are "constantly hitting limitations" you're either a very odd startup or using it very wrong. As long as the volume is small you can make almost anything happen on SQL. Hell, most small business I've known run mostly on Excel. Somehow I don't see a startup needing NoSQL unless they specialized in processing huge amounts of data, in which case trying to make slashdot work on your core business seems stupid. But maybe I missed something...

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. Justification for new toys? by StuartHankins · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The post is so vaguely worded, I imagine the author is merely trying to find some justification to purchase some new toys. "See, Slashdot people think this is a good idea!"

    I agree with most of the posts so far -- if you're truly hitting a limit, you are most likely doing something wrong. Hire an outside DBA to make recommendations if you don't have the resources in-house. I strongly suspect this is the real issue.