Re:A return to the general-purpose database
by hypertele-Xii on Thursday October 28, 2021 @10:43PM
(#29034603)
Consider the hubris behind a term like autoscale. You're talking about a machine that makes more machines, adapting to its environment, and all that without human intervention.
I think it's far more likely we'll just discover that, indeed, no general solution exists, and that humans must take personal responsibility for tending to their digital gardens. We certainly have a lot of spam to weed out.
That's nice but autoscaling mongodb clusters have been working for what, 5+ years at this point?
There are limits to what you can do safely with autoscaling, sure. But a datastore without that capability will never be a universal datastore that can cover all use cases.
And they're even more limited than relational databases when it comes to the ability to scale out, or have good consistency semantics without deadlocks. Just implementing a basic mutex on a (general) filesystem is nigh-on impossible. And while AFS is impressive, there still aren't really any true master-master filesystems, much less filesystems that can autoscale.