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A comment on Ask HN: What are good resources to learn system design?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What are good resources to learn system design? by throwaway_pdp09 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @03:19AM (#24774029)
I can't tell you when to use it, I can clearly tell you when not to (as has the other guy here).

If 1 machine postgres suffices, stick with it. If it does not, would buying more processors/memory/disk fix that? If so, stick with it.

The big data stuff is when you really have too much data to deal with in one box and literally cannot get round that.

The tradeoffs are (my limited experience): cost in terms of buying a stack of boxes. Cost in terms of learning a massive new software stack. Cost in terms of "it scales almost infinitely but each node processes so much less".

I gave a link before, I hope that showed something useful. Here's another, see article and paper https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=scalability%20%22at%20wha...

Does that provide (at least the beginnings of) an answer?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What are good resources to learn system design? by throwaway_pdp09 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @08:59AM (#24775990)
(that last line could come across as rather snotty; was not intended that way. Meant to imply I'm happy to try to answer any questions to the very limited extent that I can).
[ Parent | on HN ]