[Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?

Richard Pieri richard.pieri at gmail.com
Fri Aug 3 10:51:00 EDT 2012


On 8/2/2012 10:57 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
>> going.  They eventually gave up when Ameritrade wouldn't commit to
>> replacing the entire cluster with bigger servers.
> Ahhh Bingo! We have the problem.

Yes.  Relational databases don't scale.  You just keep throwing bigger 
and bigger hardware at them.  That's not scaling.


> You are arguing semantics.

I'm arguing storage and retrieval mechanisms.  It's ultimately just bits 
on some kind of media.  What differentiates relational databases from 
object databases is what the two design philosophies say to do with 
those bits.

>> Then why bother with a relational database at all?
> Who's bothering?

You are.

> This is No-SQL nonsense. The strength of an RDBMS is the man-centuries
> of work and science embodied in retrieving data. The relational
> capability is a very powerful tool, sure, but in the end the real
> science is finding the data you want.

Just because there are man-centuries of work in the field doesn't make 
it the best way to do things.

At this point I don't think there's any point to trying to continue 
this.  We're not debating; we're running around in circles.

-- 
Rich P.



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