But I disagree with him strongly here.
Sometimes hipster tech is just hipster for the sake of hipster, but if I have to choose between a sharded replicated MySQL cluster with some sort of active/passive across the WAN HA or Cassandra, I'm choosing Cassandra every time, and it's not close.
Linear horizontal scaling (double capacity? double # of nodes), no SPOF, Active/Active/Active cross-WAN HA.
> And what's your refutation for his desire to use MySQL over some other database, from his point of view as presented in the article (e.g. availability of support via Google/SO)?
Hire people that can learn DB internals and be the expert you want to see in the world: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user:4774369+[cassandra]
Cassandra and similar technologies constrain your queries and make schema changes incredibly expensive. This is the opposite of what you need in a startup. You need flexibility.
Would you argue in favour of MongoDB?
Never looked back after stared using it a few months ago.