Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale?

Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by itake on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @10:27AM (#32995644)

I was in a system design interview where the interviewer didn't like that I chose MySQL for storage, because it doesn't scale. I pointed that I literally used to work at a b2c app in this exact problem space that exclusively used MySQL storage. I haven't heard back yet from the company and its been 2 weeks :-/.

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by danpalmer on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @01:17PM (#32998247)

Well MySQL scales in much the same way that SQLite does – if you build sufficient tooling around it, you can scale it as much as you like.

MySQL comes with a bunch more built-in that SQLite does, but Facebook and GitHub aren't scaling purely with the built-in functionality, they're writing their applications to be sharding-aware, they're writing custom proxies, they're running custom extensions, they're picking and choosing which bits of core functionality they allow in order to minimise scaling issues.

I think in a systems design interview these issues need to be addressed, to show that you have the skills to be able to implement this, and I think that a good interviewer should be open to this discussion!

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by derekperkins on Thursday October 06, 2022 @07:41PM (#33115621)

GitHub is using Vitess internally to avoid applications needing to be shard aware

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by nolevels on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @10:22PM (#33003575)

That's unfortunate. I hate system design interviews where the interviewer has a "known" solution in mind and won't accept any other solutions even with good arguments, but you could have dodged a bullet if they are completely stubborn to work with.

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by sofixa on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @11:10AM (#32996341)

You should tell them about Facebook, YouTube and GitHub, on top of your own personal experience (which might be harder to verify).

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by itake on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @11:47AM (#32996911)

I mentioned Facebook. The problem was about storing product reviews and I literally used to work at Yelp, which exclusively uses MySQL for the primary database. My current job also includes product reviews and I am very familiar with how low traffic review systems are. MySQL can definitely handle 10qps writes.

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by ransom1538 on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @10:41AM (#32995864)

"MySQL for storage, because it doesn't scale"

haha.

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by phendrenad2 on Thursday September 29, 2022 @02:41PM (#33025248)

Please leave a Glassdoor review so the world knows that their tech leads are clueless.

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by richbell on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @09:46PM (#33003381)

> because it doesn't scale

Did they give an example of a database that "scales"?

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by easrng on Wednesday September 28, 2022 @03:21AM (#33005126)

MongoDB is web scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

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Re:Ask HN: Real-world anecdotes of MySQL at scale? by atmosx on Wednesday September 28, 2022 @12:22PM (#33009794)

LOL. Okay...

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