jtseng

Many people say that DBs are not good for large blobs, hence the advice to put large files such as images in the files system, not in the database. What's different here that makes it acceptable to put files in the database?

They do have a cluster: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/09/microsoft-sql-serve...

They just run everything through one live database all the time under normal conditions. Personally, I think this is much simpler to manage than to be regularly spreading out queries over many queries.

I really wanted to use Scala+Play to get away from the MS stack, but the documentation for Play was pretty hard to navigate due to the volume of documentation and the breaking changes in 2.

We've recently started down this C#/Postgres route. One of the main decisions to use C# was static typing, so I wanted to keep this with the data access layer as well. I've decided to use dotConnect for PostgreSQL so I can use EF. I figure I can use dapper or another micro ORM after I get into performance issues.

Our biggest problem with Postgres is actually the lack of a good GUI. I'm using 0xDBE for the amazing auto complete and PgAdmin for everything else.

From the interviews I've done so far, the algorithm questions are more important. From our perspective, it's much easier for someone good with algorithms to learn a few technologies than for someone with a few technologies to learn algorithms. Plus, you're going to need to take some time to familiarize yourself with our software system anyway. It doesn't matter too much to us if you take two months to ramp up or 3.

This just seems like a better way to evaluate candidates even though we rarely have difficult algorithmic problem in our daily work.