Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Trapped In MySQL a 'Fate Worse Than Death'
wasimkadak writes with this excerpt from GigaOM: "According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to 'a fate worse than death,' and the only way out is 'bite the bullet and rewrite everything.' Not that it's necessarily Facebook's fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network's predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions."
I love the snippets "After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed" from the article and "We’ve been using stonge age technology to solve problems that didn’t exist 30 years ago." Yes, the problems existed 30 years ago, such as (land-line) telephone billing. I don't know how those problems were solved -- probably with a mainframe and a custom non-SQL database and not a PC running a SQL-based server -- but they were solved.
Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.
Presumably he's tired of Facebook being used as a counter-example to everything he's been preaching.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
A minor difference that exists in 4,000 instances and who knows how many places in the code that's also distributed across multiple servers, isn't minor, especially when there are hundreds or even thousands of minor differences.
And no, the differences in SQL between Oracle and MySQL aren't minor. It's not just syntax, and it's not MySQL-can-Oracle-can't. It's the performance characteristics of various queries, the logic of how they're implemented, and the incredible investment in configuring a large cluster to work smoothly (which MySQL and Oracle do extremely differently. Large scale systems add a layer of complexity all their own that's a totally separate engineering challenge.
Short version: Switching from MySQL to anything else would be the equivalent to a ground-up rewrite, though this is largely true of any database system. MySQL hasn't somehow uniquely trapped them here.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
If you wan't to start a fun/interesting project that you didn't expect any revenue from, it would make more sense to use free software. MySQL is a popular choice for web applications and there is a lot of freely available documentation and examples available. Many people have been successful doing it, so it's a proven path that works.
Oracle is expensive. It would have cost a fortune to start Facebook with Oracle, and I can't imagine what it would cost them now. But even if they have to hire a ton of experts to convert to Oracle( assuming that is the best thing to do...) They can probably be funded by the money saved by not using Oracle over the past couple of years.
Maybe Oracle would have been a mistake, there are companies migrating from Oracle to DB2/DB2 to Oracle/Oracle to Sybase/Sybase to MySQL/Mainframe to AIX/AIX to Solaris/Solaris to Linux/etc.. It seems like nobody can agree to the best hardware/OS/database solution, but there are plenty of people who swear that the solution they know is the best one.
If anything, it's a success story for MySQL.