Now the Joe Plump or whatever guy is telling people that you should sort in PHP. That is the level of expertise of Digg.
I actually flagged the parent article. It's a troll, and not worth anyone's time. RDBMS is good sometimes. NoSQL is good sometimes. Do we really need _another_ holy war?
Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish. It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"? These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.
That's a pretty good reason to flag a story. The entire argument is based on the premise that others are idiots: hubris of which we are often guilty. After you've been in the trenches for a while, you should realize that there is usually a pretty reasonable explanation for seemingly stupid problems.
And a few choice statements from the article:
> I would say Digg's case is an example of a bottom-feeder RDBMS product (apologies for being incendiary, but why does the problem always come down to MySQL? These examples always end up being "we moved from MySQL to NoSQL" rather than "We moved from Sybase ASE to NoSQL"), used arguably suboptimally on unpowered hardware,
> went contrary to the demonstration that even a mediocre machine can beat their results.
> Nonetheless, it is a warning sign of a foundational product issue.
> Decent database products like SQL Server even allow you to include
> So either MySQL is an atrociously bad product at the larger limits, which ample evidence seems to point as a truism,
> Please get away from the compiler and save the world from your monstrosities until you have some knowledge of these basic concepts.
> Alternately you can just clutch onto NoSQL and bleat about how it changes all of the rules anyways, which is the route quite a few have decided to pursue
Okay, I'm done. Point is, dude is straight up trolling about how MySQL sucks. This article does nothing but fuel the fire of yet another flamewar, and so it gets flagged. I'd like discussions to remain sane around here.
Maybe MySQL really isn't a decent database product, or not for high performance needs. How many of his statements are troll-ish in that light?
The specific case -- IIRC -- Digg mentioned was a query which required MySQL to generate a temporary table too large to sit in memory, so it ended up being done on disk. Moving some of the processing out of the DB query and into PHP avoided that, understandably resulting in a huge performance difference (in-memory versus on-disk has a way of doing that...).