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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."

7 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. "We're so new" by michaelmalak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Successful Troll is Successful by tyler_larson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Successful Troll is Successful by rgmoore · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, he's not an academic purist; he's a businessman who's selling a product that competes with MySQL. So he's trying to convince web startups to pay a bunch of money for his product rather than rely on free MySQL because he claims it will help them scale better than Facebook. IOW, businessman trashes competitor's product, claims you should buy from him instead. Nothing to see here.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  3. 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.

  4. looks like facebook is doing just fine... by tommeke100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If anything, it's a success story for MySQL.

  5. That's not Facebook's problem by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Right.

    Some of the key architects of Facebook have spoken at Stanford about how the system is put together, and I went to that presentation and had a chance to talk to them. They didn't consider MySQL to be a bottleneck. Their big problem was PHP performance. They were writing a PHP compiler to fix that.

    Internally, the user-facing side of Facebook is in PHP. But the front end machines don't talk directly to the databases. They use an RPC system to talk to other machines that do the "business logic" parts of the system. Building a Facebook reply page may involve a hundred machines. There's heavy caching all over the system, of course, so the databases aren't hit for most read requests.

    The RPC system isn't HTML, JSON, or SOAP. It's a binary system that doesn't require text parsing. Otherwise, RPC would be the bottleneck.

    This makes for a flexible, easy to enhance system. New services go in new machines, which talk to existing machines.

  6. Stonebraker trapped in Stonebraker by midom · · Score: 5, Informative

    (reposting as a logged in user) I wrote a bit longer response to this:
    stonebraker trapped in stonebraker 'fate worse than death'

    I think I know a bit more about database situation inside FB than Mr.Stonebraker. Go figure.