Sharding

Through the wonderful magic of corporate agreements, I’ve been pulled back into (hopefully temporarily) managing a small army of MySQL servers. No! Why can’t this just be a terrible nightmare?! Does anyone deserve such debasement? Side effects of using MySQL may include… Hyperbole? Maybe a little. If MySQL was really that terrible, it wouldn’t be in such widespread use. However, as a Postgres DBA for so many years, I’ve come to appreciate what really sets it apart from engines and development approaches like those showcased in MySQL.

The pure, unadulterated, presumptuous impudence of NoSQL. Engines like MongoDB recklessly discard concepts like ACID in some futile quest to achieve “web scale”, and end up accomplishing neither. RDBMS systems have literally decades of history to draw upon, and have long since conquered the pitfalls NoSQL platforms are just now encountering. There may be something to a couple of them, but by and large, they’re nothing we really need. At least, that’s something I might have said a couple of weeks ago.