by Angela Guess
Derrick Harris recently followed up on a post he wrote a few weeks back regarding an interview he had with Michael Stonebraker, a keynote speaker at the upcoming NoSQL Now! Conference. Harris recaps that the gist of the post “was that legacy SQL databases, including MySQL, are relics and no longer relevant with regard to today’s web applications. Stonebraker cited Facebook’s renowned MySQL-plus-memcached architecture as an example of how much effort it takes to make such databases keep up with applications that store lots of data and serve high rates of transactions. By and large, the responses weren’t positive.”
Harris contends that those opposed to Stonebraker’s view seemed to miss his point: “Stonebraker wasn’t calling out Facebook, nor was he suggesting (as far as I can tell) that it abandon MySQL tomorrow. Yes, he has a product, VoltDB, to sell, but that shouldn’t blur the overall message: Whatever database technology someone might choose to use for a new web application, anyone who hopes to achieve even a fraction of Facebook’s traffic should not go down the same path as Facebook did. Facebook’s implementation is a sign of the times in which it was built, but the evidence suggests that if Facebook could do it over again with today’s database options, it wouldn’t go down the same path. Sharding MySQL thousands of times, operating thousands of memcached servers and paying a team of crack engineers to keep it scaling is nobody’s idea of fun.”
He continues, “Nobody denies that Facebook’s MySQL team is supremely smart or that it does a great job innovating to ensure that the database is able to keep up with the site’s transactions. Jim Starkey, the founder and CTO of NimbusDB — and a man with some serious relational database and MySQL credentials – puts it well. “You either scale to where your customer base takes you or you die,” he said, and Facebook has been able to do with MySQL what would others would not have been able to do. It has “absolutely skilled” engineers, he added, but they don’t exist everywhere, and Facebook has the added benefit of being able to pay them.”
photo credit: Orange County Archives
