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Facebook Trapped In MySQL a 'Fate Worse Than Death'

Posted by timothy on from the cake-or-death-or-trapped-in-mysql dept.

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."

1 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Keep on backpedalling, you silly NoSQLers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's hilarious how the NoSQL fools are now constantly backpedalling these days.

    It turns out that writing database queries in JavaScript is a stupid idea! Imagine that! All of their attempts to invent a better query language end up being almost identical to, guess what, SQL!

    Then they realize that trying to maintain data consistency using logic written in JavaScript, Ruby or PHP doesn't work so well. Values go unconstrained, and the referential integrity gets fucked up. Soon the data is nearly worthless.

    The smarter/less-ignorant ones then think that they'll just use transactions. But wait, their NoSQL database of choice doesn't support that, or doesn't support it properly. So they tell themselves that their data will become "eventually consistent", or worse, they try to implement some shitty ass "transaction" support using Ruby. Regardless of the path chosen, failure is the result.

    Now they're realizing that it's mandatory to use a real relational database when working on anything remotely serious. So we see this bullshit about "no" now meaning "not only". That's funny, last month it meant "no", as in, "we will never write a SQL query again, and we will never use a relational database again."

    I'm going to make a prediction: Next month, we'll get to read articles and comments from them about these amazing new database systems that they've just discovered. These new systems avoid all of the problems associated with NoSQL databases! What are their names? Oracle, DB/2, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite.