Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

Posted Jul 24, 2008 5:52 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: Drizzle: a lighter MySQL by flewellyn
Parent article: Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

A RDBMS is hardly an optimal fit for web-based applications. RDBMS are designed for small transactions from random sources with strong integrity needs. The basic assumption -- that all applications are like 1970s green screen banking systems -- isn't true of database-backed web sites. MySQL has benefited from this; for a long time it offered adequate integrity for DB-based web sites but inadequate integrity for traditional online transaction processing. There is plenty of scope for experimentation with database designs to find a better fits to web applications, data warehousing, and image storage.

There's also plenty of scope for differing emphasises. The traditional RDBMS minimises worst-case latency. This isn't the same as best average performance. The traditional RDBMS is disk I/O oriented and designed with an eye to a reasonable use of disk space. But RAM is so available in bulk quantities now, SSD gives an alternative to complex journaling designs, disks are so massive that most past trade-offs of space v performance are now wrong, but at the same time disk speed hasn't improved much at all.

There's a nice article on these points by some RDBMS pioneers at ACM Queue.

Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

Posted Jul 25, 2008 0:44 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

A RDBMS is hardly an optimal fit for web-based applications.

REALLY? Because, y'know, I develop web-based applications for a living, and we use an RDBMS (PostgreSQL) as our data backend. And, the funny thing is, it all works quite nicely. It's fast, powerful, and flexible. And my company's applications (web-based GIS and image analysis) are quite a long ways from 1970s green-screen banking systems.

Interestingly, in the article you linked, Stonebraker didn't talk much about web-based applications. He was talking more about data warehouses and real-time stream processing applications. Most web applications that I've seen don't look anything like those.