Lincoln Yeoh wrote: > What's more important to such companies is the ability to scale over > multiple machines.
That question - how much work it is to administer thousands of database servers - seems to have been largely missing from this conversation.
Apparently back in 2008, Facebook had 1800 MySQL servers with 2 DBAs.[1]
I wonder how that compares with large-scale Postgres deployments.
From a technology standpoint, it doesn't need to be ostensibly different, provided you use Postgres in a way similar to how facebook is using MySQL. Well, at least now; 8.4's re-implementation of the free space map was critical for "zero-administration" type deployments. If you can script basic failover deployments (remember that 1/2 of those 1800 are just slave machines), you don't abstract storage from the app, and you keep database schema similar across nodes, you can really ramp up the number of deployed servers per dba.