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Comment by hetfeld | Hacker News Reader

Dropped Oracle, using MySQL. Why not use PostgreSQL instead?

I work on the Netflix Billing Team.

PostgreSQL was indeed a very attractive option, but we wanted to keep a path to Aurora open. When we were working on the migration, Aurora was still in beta, so instead of going to Aurora directly, we decided run our own MySQL instances on EC2.

Ahhh, now it makes sense. Thanks for answering.

Why would you go to RDS with such large amounts of data when AWS do not provide ability to get data out easily. If you moved away from AWS in the future for what ever reason your data is more or less stuck in AWS.

Amazon released their data migration service a while back, which allows you to transfer data in just about anyway you might want to, they'll migrate data between different RDS engines (MySQL to Postgres for example), and to databases outside AWS. They even support near real-time replication to database servers outside AWS, so you could hypothetically replicate your RDS instances to a fail over environment with another provider. There's very little risk of your data being locked in now.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_mo

Unless you use SQL Server. The dms service is basically useless with sqlserver. We can't get our 200gb do out of AWS. And any method that works without dms takes about 40 hours.

Can you replicate to a slave outside of RDS and then perform a replica promotion during scheduled maintenance?

Does "Aurora" fix the inherently broken SQL and integrity constraint mishandling associated with MySQL?

Which security models does "Aurora" offer, for instance, are you able to use OS authentication like in Oracle? What about PKI on SmartCards?

Is there a version of poe's law for hacker news / slashdot?

A large company describes their very real efforts and shares their experience and knowledge, and the first comment is "Why not use <preferred thing> instead?".

Because knowing how they worked through the decision to come to a conclusion on using a particular product is valuable.

Postgres is usually the first choice for applications like this so knowing why they chose something else over that could influence others that need to make a similar decision.

When you say usually you probably mean "currently, usually" or "in the last x years usually".

Netflix has super smart people. They arent just picking random tools off the shelf and implementing things without constraints for the sake of it.

Right, which is why asking how they came to that decision (instead of using a DB dating back over three decades of development) is useful and reasonable.

> Postgres is usually the first choice for applications like this

Do you have any data to substantiate this claim?

I know regarding HIPAA, Aurora isn't supported but mySQL is. Maybe there's a reason why it's not HIPAA compliant that made it unusable for Netflix? And cost?

What aspects of HIPAA does Aurora cause problems for which wouldn't be a problem for other storage engines? The Aurora engine RDS product supports all of the normal MySQL access controls, SSL in transit and at-rest encryption for the data, snapshots and backups.

I don't believe it's a technical problem. It just hasn't completed the internal AWS process for HIPAA certification to be added to their BAA. Postgres is in the same boat.

Where is the intersection between HIPPA and a back-office customer billing system?

Assuming MySQL meets their needs there's no hugely compelling reason to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL.

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