Even better: Have a link that says: "Try the new Beta" at the top like gmail and google docs, with a "Go back to Old Version".
Implementing this should not be to hard and it allows them to get some feedback.
Implementing this should not be to hard and it allows them to get some feedback.
In this case you would not just have to write scrips to one-time migrate all needed data from v3 mysql to v4 Cassandra.
No. You would have to build a mechanism that doesn't just do it in both directions, it would also have to work at near-realtime speed.
If you then need consistency of the transferred data, this quickly gets impossible. Try finding a way to ensure consistency between these two completely different architectures.
In the end, most of v3 would have needed to be rewritten for a parallel use to be possible, at which point you don't really gain much.
"not hard to implement" - sigh
Disclaimer: I don't work at digg and I don't know more about their backend than the rest of the public. I did however just get around doing something like what you describe and there it wad "just" a different schema on the same database backend and even just that would have been hell
Now in the current case, the most issues apparently come from the non-working backend as opposed to the changed featureset.
So while they could have run the two versions in parallel, they would not have gained anything. Likely, this was their rationale behind not doing so in the first place.
It's not a system that would be ideal for something transactional like a bank, but it may have been possible for an organization like Digg.
> Implementing this should not be to hard...