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The false dichotomy between MySQL and NoSQL is really irritating. Just because MySQL isn't solving the problem, doesn't mean that you have to completely change the database structure.

There are more grown-up SQL servers out there that can handle way more than MySQL, and not one of these "NewSQL" things that the author talks about.

Sure, let's bet the whole site on a really new database. Worked really well for Digg!

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I doubt Facebook is going to go spend megabucks on Oracle, though. And Postgres isn't going to make your life all that much better at FB levels of scale.

Spending money on Oracle or moving to Postgres will just make things worse.

At that scale you need to do 2 things, denormalize and cache. (And, if you're FB, buy 75% of FusionIO's production). Big complicated queries just don't scale like simple key-value lookups, especially if they impose locking constraints on your database or try to join against things that are sharded to different servers.

Doesn't really matter what database back-end you're using if you're only using the dead-simple features.

It depends what you mean by "spending money on Oracle". They'll happily sell you TimesTen or Coherence as well as the classic RDBMS remember. And the classic RDBMS in the right hands is bloody quick.

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