Relational databases were invented in 1970. The basic design for most of the popular RDBMSs today (Oracle, DB2, Ingres → Postgres, Sybase) was created in the 1980s. In 1982 you could buy a 5MB Winchester disk for US$2000. A terabyte of disk therefore would have cost US$400 million.
This is not what relational databases were designed for.
Otherwise your comment is correct.
Re:How did SQL get so popular?
by silentbicycle on Thursday June 04, 2009 @11:06AM
(#641506)
Hence, "are designed", not "were designed".
Interesting data point, by the way. I have a little USB flash drive that stores 4 GB. It was about $10. That's probably more disk storage than existed in the entire world until Y years ago -- any idea what year?
Every time a framework pulls a big set of data across the wire to do a local calculation on it (a for loop summing a list of values, for example), it's doing a completely unnecessary round trip to do (probably in PHP or Ruby, no less) a task for which the database has already been specifically optimized. It could have done all the calculation during the same pass it took to select the records and just sent the answer instead.
Frameworks obscure this.
Just a thought.