snacktime <snacktime@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm working through the architecture design for a new product. We
> have a small group working on this. It's a web app that will be using
> ruby on rails. The challenge I'm running into is that the latest
> conventional wisdom seems to be that since obviously databases don't
> scale on the web, you should just not use them at all.
Who are the people saying this? It doesn't sound very wise to me.
Where are they proposing to put the data, if not in a database? That's
what I'd like to know.
> I have a group
> of otherwise very bright people trying to convince me that a rdbms is
> not a good place to store relational data because eventually it won't
> scale.
What is _their_ evidence?
> And of course we don't even have version 1 of our product out
> of the door.
E.S. Raymond's "The Art of UNIX Programming": Rule #15: Write a
prototype before you optimize.
Nothing is funnier than watching people try to performance optimize
software that hasn't even been written yet. Very few people are
smart enough to know where the performance bottlenecks will be before
they've coded anything. If they insist on doing it wrong, at least
you'll have a good laugh.
> I'll admit we do have a very good chance of actually
> getting tons of traffic, but my position is to use a rdbms for
> relational data, and then if and when it won't scale any more, deal
> with it then.
That's sane.
> So what would really help me is some real world numbers on how
> postgresql is doing in the wild under pressure. If anyone cares to
> throw some out I would really appreciate it.
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/
Lots of interesting graphs on that page ... most of them seem to indicate
that RDBMS scale rather nicely.
--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com