FWIW I work on a "non-scalable" RDBMS that comfortably handles thousands of commits/sec, tens of thousands of selects/sec and tens of terabytes of data. All done with stored procs, one database, no need for "sharding" either. Will it scale indefinitely? No, but neither will anything else. The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.
And, yeah, damn right I'm hesitant about a single piece of hardware that costs $200k and still leaves you with a SPOF. Effectively you're saying it's a 400k piece of hardware after replication. Oh, and Oracle replication software costs you an extra several hundred thousand. So for about a million dollars, yeah, unless it's incredibly transactional in nature, I'd give other options a very serious look.
I still think embedding all your app logic together with your underlying data in PL/SQL or any equivalents is a bad idea but hey that's for anyone to do and find out themselves :)
Agreed. There's a couple of orders of magnitude just from I/O improvement in hardware, using conventional[1] hardware, configured intelligently.
There's at least another order of magnitude in optimizations that aren't possible in NoSQL's strawman[2], such as separate tablespaces for data and index, partial indexes, and a galaxy of query tuning from an EXPLAIN that actuall provides a query plan.
[1] Meaning commodity-priced, nothing fancier than $400 RAID cards and spinning disks.
[2] MySQL
Moore's law doesn't apply to RPMs of spinning disks.
This is only significant if one is limited to a trivial number of spinning disks. 20 years ago, with separate disk controllers, this was the case.
If you run some benchmarks, I expect you'll find that, for random I/O, N disks perform better than N times one of those disks.
SCSI provided (arguably) an order of magnitude for number of disks per system.
Now, SAS provides another. $8k will buy 100 disks (and enclosures, expanders, etc). How many IOPS is that?
ETA: The Fujitsu Eagle (my archetype of 20ish years ago disk technology) had, IIRC, an average access time of 28ms. If its sequential transfer rate was one 60-100th of modern disks, what fraction of a modern disk's 4k IOPS could it do?
PL/SQL, though, with global data reach and advanced locking states for every single transaction, make it really hard to move off of a single host. So it's more and more work to get more disks attached to that host, and CPU is a hard upper limit.
Agreed, if you include fast interconects like SAS and exclude the network[1] requirement of SANs.
sharding/distribution across multiple nodes another.
I disagree, for the sam reason that doing so with iSCSI over ethernet isn't: too much added latency.
Infiniband may help, but I have yet to try it empirically.
[1] Switching/routing, multiple initiators, distances longer than a few dozen meters.
Usually they learned how to use MySQL from thirdhand PHP & MySQL tutorials off somebody's blog or something, and thought it was representative of all RDBMSs.
Not saying everyone using "NoSQL" is poorly informed, just that sometimes peoples' impressions of performance aren't very accurate. It makes me suspicious when somebody's benchmark only uses MySQL.
>The limits of the RDBMS are orders of magnitude greater than the NoSQL crowd think they are.
Wish I had more upvotes. Knowing what logic to put in stored procs, and what to put in the application code, so as to play to the strengths of the db and the strengths of the appserver, seems to be a lost art these days.
It's not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with the relational model, it's that, as formulated, it's really hard to split up into multiple machines.
A HDD is limited to well under a thousand reads per second, and there's multiple reads per SQL select, so I'll assume either yes or you're leaving something out. If the tens of thousands of reads are over a 4MB table that stays in memory and the rest of your 10TB are infrequently accessed, congrats, you have a single-node problem. If you actually need to deliver, say, 1,000 queries per second over a 10TB dataset? It's not happening in an RDBMS unless you get a whole bunch of SSDs.
Also, RE: websites, of course, substitute your environment's front end if you'd like.
Still doesn't add up to 10k select statements per second over a 10TB dataset on a singlenode. Even without writes, that's not happening. I call BS on grandparent post.
With a half-decent SAN with 15k drives and 4Gbit fibrechannel connections, you can get 1000+ IOPS without the storage system even breaking a sweat. Under load it can easily give 10 times that.
This is something that's everywhere in the business world.
Pair this with a bunch of cores and a few GB of memory, and you can have an RDBMS that chews through impressive amounts of data. Unless, of course, you optimize nothing and swamp it with lame queries that do nothing that table scans. Funny enough, the same people that are fine with doing everything in code are the ones that can't be bothered to think more than one second about what kind of queries they are throwing at the database.
Again, as I say, the NoSQL crowd have no idea about what the state of the art is in the RDBMS world.
it's awfully hard to even fit 10TB on a RAID1+0 setup
It would actually be hard for me to buy an array that small...
How many commodity servers could I buy for that?
I have a pretty solid idea what state of the art is in the RDBMS world - it's diminishing returns as a machine that's twice as powerful costs 10X as much, all the way up the enterprise ladder. It's spending 100k on your software licenses, 100k on your storage and 500 bucks on a CPU.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's ok. If your domain is highly transactional, it's probably a better move than implementing your own transactions over something else. Just don't pretend that your limitations are actually strengths -- you have your own strengths.
Because you can't compete at this level by chucking increasing amounts of anything at the problem - people, dollars, spindles, nodes, you name it.
If your problem is extremely transactional and legitimately unshardable, feel free to drop 6 mil on exadata. Or a half a mil on a database server and backup. But frankly, your objections are starting to have a religious feel to them. All I was saying is that PL/SQL is a pile of crap to code in and fundamentally unscalable without spending a boatload of money. A little better design can get the same thing with a lot less cash.
EDIT: No, those are facts, PL/SQL looks like it was designed in 1965 and, yes, putting all of your CPU processing into a single node is fundamentally unscalable. I've seen it. It was fundamentally unscalable.
I'm not making a religious point about RDBMS - it can be the best model in many situations. I'm making a point about single bottlenecks for your architecture.
Oracle tried to market their Exalogic as "no bottlenecks" which is nearly as funny as "unbreakable linux" and "zero latency".
In one of the code-word projects I saw an $25k system with an OLTP dataset do 1 billion rows in a second.
Edit: We also had statistics that said that 90% of our customers had less than 100GB of data. 99% had < 1 TB. The vast majority of database users shouldn't even be thinking about looking at non-RDBMS systems.
If your dataset fits in memory on one node, I'm all about using a database (prefer MySQL personally, might look at postgres now that it finally has replication).