To the good folks at 10Gen, Antirez, the Cassandra project, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and everyone working to advance the state of datastores available for increasingly specific applications, your work is undeniably important. The team I work with has been evaluating a handful of emerging datastores for some applications and are making plans to migrate a few types of data in some of our systems from one to another. Thank God that we have choice beyond a standard RDBMS and BDB.
To the armies of bloggers parroting slogan after slogan, ricing benchmarks so far removed from real-world applications as to place themselves somewhere on the spectrum between meaningless and malicious in the name of pageviews, well, that's not helping anyone.
It's great to see people get excited about new technologies. But if tech/startup culture is one that embraces and celebrates the fail, then we damn well better also talk about the different areas where many different datastores are not appropriate choices, and where some of them downright break, risking extensive downtime or corruption, require unreasonable amounts memory for indexes, or multiple machines to provide for durability, or return inconsistent "postmodern" results, or what have you -- without it being understood as a personal attack on any one individual, company, or sector.
The productivity of this video is debatable, sure. But perhaps we can appreciate that it parodies the "magic scaling sauce" image that the "tech press" (face it, we're it) has given surprisingly young but maturing technologies. There's no magic sauce, no drop-in answer to "web scale," and certainly nothing fraught with difficulty. It's data. If you have a ton of it and it's valuable, it's worth mountains of expensive programmer time and effort to ensure its integrity, accessibility, and utility based on the storage and query requirements of an application.
To the armies of bloggers parroting slogan after slogan, ricing benchmarks so far removed from real-world applications as to place themselves somewhere on the spectrum between meaningless and malicious in the name of pageviews, well, that's not helping anyone.
It's great to see people get excited about new technologies. But if tech/startup culture is one that embraces and celebrates the fail, then we damn well better also talk about the different areas where many different datastores are not appropriate choices, and where some of them downright break, risking extensive downtime or corruption, require unreasonable amounts memory for indexes, or multiple machines to provide for durability, or return inconsistent "postmodern" results, or what have you -- without it being understood as a personal attack on any one individual, company, or sector.
The productivity of this video is debatable, sure. But perhaps we can appreciate that it parodies the "magic scaling sauce" image that the "tech press" (face it, we're it) has given surprisingly young but maturing technologies. There's no magic sauce, no drop-in answer to "web scale," and certainly nothing fraught with difficulty. It's data. If you have a ton of it and it's valuable, it's worth mountains of expensive programmer time and effort to ensure its integrity, accessibility, and utility based on the storage and query requirements of an application.