Scalability Requirements

October 8, 2007

In passing, Dare Obasanjo makes a very good point (talking about the inapplicability of RDBMS systems to solve very-large-scale requirements):

Luckily, there are only a handful of companies and Web services in the world that need to operate at that scale.

While I believe “a handful” is a little too restrictive, I’m pretty sure that for the vast majority of applications, an RDBMS is the right choice (if simple file-based store isn’t sufficient).

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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on October 8, 2007 9:02 AM. The previous post in this blog was S/MIME is not for Mail Only. The next post in this blog is AtomPub RFC. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Comments

I think a number of these ideas also apply to maintainability, in particular the ability to evolve components more independently than tends to be the case in the IT data centers I am familiar with (and which seem to be the norm, from comparing notes).

Posted by: Patrick Logan at October 13, 2007 11:18 PM | link

Agreed — my point is probably more organizational, or even political, then technical; reasons for choosing something other than an RDBMS would have to be extremely good.

Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at October 14, 2007 12:31 AM | link