Friday, July 08, 2011

Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’ — Cloud Computing News

Michael Stonebraker again fans the NoSQL/NewSQL/etc. flames; I suspect he and/or the people quoting him are being deliberately and unhelpfully ambiguous (e.g., failing to clearly distinguish between implementations of SQL and SQL the language, which is included even in “modern” DBMSs such as Stonebraker’s VoltDB).  Review the comment thread at the article link below for some insightful data integrity checks.

In Stonebraker’s opinion, “old SQL (as he calls it) is good for nothing” and needs to be “sent to the home for retired software.” 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.

But products such as MySQL are also open-source and free, and SQL skills aren’t hard to come by. This means, Stonebraker says, that when web startups decide they need to build a product in a hurry, MySQL is natural choice. But then they hit that hockey-stick-like growth rate like Facebook did, and they don’t really have the time to re-engineer the service from the database up. Instead, he said, they end up applying Band-Aid fixes that solve problems as they occur, but that never really fix the underlying problem of an inadequate data-management strategy.

Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’ — Cloud Computing News

No comments: