Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’ (2011)

Best figures I could find in a quick search was <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.cnet.com&#x2F;8301-1023_3-57566550-93&#x2F;facebook-by-the-numbers-1.06-billion-monthly-active-users&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.cnet.com&#x2F;8301-1023_3-57566550-93&#x2F;facebook-by-the...</a><p>618 million Daily Active Users.<p>4000 shards, 9000 memcache instances.<p>Simple math, 618m&#x2F;4000 is 154000 users per database (this is a horrible metric but illustrates my point) and 618m&#x2F;9000 = 68666 and a bit users per memcache intances.<p>I hardly think this is a &quot;fate worse than death&quot;, When you have a billion users with 600,000,000 DAU&#x27;s <i>whatever technology you use is going to have snags as you are pushing the envelope in just about every way</i>.<p>This article reads like a Microsoft Whitepaper about why only a Microsoft technology running on a Microsoft platform will solve all your problems.

Stonebraker is known for posting ridiculous things like this in the SQL&#x2F;NoSQL community. Look at the marketing hype for VoltDB for an idea. He also loves to rag on Riak, which is a pretty solid KV store. This is ridiculous

(2011)<p>Previous comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2740432" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2740432</a>

Article is two years old, FB apocalypse hasn&#x27;t happened.

The sheer fact that FB was able to scale MySQL for their use till now proves that there is nothing wrong with MySQL. There are few apps of FB scale ever created. This would mean for most apps, MySQL is more than enough. This is another snake oil vendor peddling his unproven oil.

Of course the guy pushing an alternative is going to say that FB is doing it all wrong.

Anytime an engineer tells me that the only solution to something is to &quot;bite the bullet and rewrite everything,&quot; I lose all respect for them.

It&#x27;s funny because Facebook is actually where Cassandra was born. Now under the Apache umbrella, it&#x27;s odd that they didn&#x27;t even mention it in that article. It&#x27;s got by far the most momentum in the distributed database league.

Clarke&#x27;s 1st law comes to mind :<p><pre><code> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. </code></pre> The other two :<p><pre><code> 2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.</code></pre>

... &quot;running entirely in-memory instead of on disk.&quot; ... Yeah one can see where problems might be. Why not just use the heap instead and have shards data + code and shard them that way? but then it won&#x27;t be (R)DBMS would it.

Warning, Stonebraker!