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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Price is the elephant in the room here; NoSQL exists because people aren't willing to pay for real databases. Building yet another expensive (i.e. > $0) database that doesn't even work in the cloud won't help the Web 2.0 crowd.

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Well, that's partly right. Yes, clustrix is more expensive than the open-source databases.

But, companies like Twitter and Netflix certainly have the budget for Exadata (which is what clustrix wants to be when it grows up); they are using Cassandra instead not just because it scales on commodity hardware (the other price factor besides licensing) but also because it works across multiple datacenters which two-phase commit systems can't do no matter how big your budget is, and because its availability (failure tolerance) model is much more robust.

(Many NoSQL systems don't provide these advantages either, which is why lumping all non-relational systems together is usually not helpful.)

These folks disagree with you. There are many more behind them.

http://gigaom.com/cloud/clustrix-lifts-the-curtain-on-early-...

And plenty of folks use MySQL (and PogreSQL to a much lesser extent). You just can't scale those.

Last time I heard, twitter still uses MySQL for the statuses (tweets) table. They did have a plan to migrate to Cassandra, but didn't go all the way through with it. So I find it hard to agree with "you just can't scale those". It may be a lot of work, but for some applications you can scale them.

Edit: twitter cassandra link (don't know if this is the latest): http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/cassandra-at-twitter-...

It's worth noting that Twitter has built a lot on top of MySQL to get to the scale they're at. Take FlockDB for example, https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

So I guess that statement should be written as "you can't scale with just those". :)

You can't scale MySQL/PostgreSQL? Care to expand? (Although Facebook's schema is likely an abomination flying in the face of every normalized form, it does run on MySQL. And it's not like throwing PostgreSQL on a big box doesn't go far.)

I can scale PostgresSQL pretty well, thanks. PostgreSQL is used on some of the biggest databases in the world, but no one's going to tell you which. :)

Your benchmark is pretty much irrelevant because Clustrix sells hardware appliances, not the software standalone.

Edit: That's not to say MongoDB didn't fail your benchmark. But the issues you highlight (single mutex) are known. Test against a real database and your results don't look that impressive for a 10 node setup.

All that said, Clustrix looks great. Just make it available sans-hardware.

I was going to make the same comment. Even very profitable companies are usually price sensitive so +1 for open source.

Profitable companies have usually figured out that it's better to buy a solution that solves their problem rather than: (a) pay for engineer time to integrate a solution that isn't quite right, (b) take the opportunity cost hit while waiting for (a) to be done. These costs can pretty quickly dwarf the purchase costs of licenses and hardware. Of course if there's a free solution that just slots right in, double bonus, but for the most part the cost of hardware/software is noise next to the cost of people to maintain it.

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