Re:Stack Overflow Architecture Update - Now At 95 Million Pa...
by bad_user on Friday March 04, 2011 @07:41AM
(#2287848)
I like your comment, but there's something untold here:
There's value in thinking inside the box - MySQL / PostgreSQL may not be the best in any category, but with inside knowledge of the internals, you may fine tune it to surpass any competitor in performance / scalability.
I can't find the project right now, but there was this one guy that made a plugin for MySQL which allowed him to get passed the query parser/optimizer and talked directly with InnoDB ... with the result being much better performance than Memcached; using InnoDB as storage. And because the Memcached protocol is public, heck, you could even have memcache-clients talking directly to your DB.
Not having loyalty to technologies or companies is pragmatic and kick-ass and makes you better in some ways - but it also gives you a wishy-washy attitude, and this outside-of-the-box thinking is actually inside-the-box from at least one perspective, as you'll end up jack of all trades, master of none.
And if you are going to master a piece of technology, which would you rather choose?
A proprietary piece of technology that's best in class for what it does, for which you don't have access to source code, and which might be discontinued after Microsoft invents this new / shiny and backwards incompatible alternative? Or an open-source alternative that's slightly worse in benchmarks or tools available or features - but that you can make it your bitch in any way imaginable?
There's value in thinking inside the box - MySQL / PostgreSQL may not be the best in any category, but with inside knowledge of the internals, you may fine tune it to surpass any competitor in performance / scalability.
I can't find the project right now, but there was this one guy that made a plugin for MySQL which allowed him to get passed the query parser/optimizer and talked directly with InnoDB ... with the result being much better performance than Memcached; using InnoDB as storage. And because the Memcached protocol is public, heck, you could even have memcache-clients talking directly to your DB.
Not having loyalty to technologies or companies is pragmatic and kick-ass and makes you better in some ways - but it also gives you a wishy-washy attitude, and this outside-of-the-box thinking is actually inside-the-box from at least one perspective, as you'll end up jack of all trades, master of none.
And if you are going to master a piece of technology, which would you rather choose?
A proprietary piece of technology that's best in class for what it does, for which you don't have access to source code, and which might be discontinued after Microsoft invents this new / shiny and backwards incompatible alternative? Or an open-source alternative that's slightly worse in benchmarks or tools available or features - but that you can make it your bitch in any way imaginable?
Pick your poison.