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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

I agree that getting deep into the weeds on some of that stuff can be taxing on a smaller development team with a few senior generalists (of which I tend to be one) but I'm quite sure that companies at github scale have deep levels of performance expertise - still not always easy of course, because lots of these types of things only come up at some certain scale

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Do not immediately assume that they do. Only those who have management that recognizes the need to have those experts even have a shot at getting them.

If they do have the required staff it still might not be readily available due to org chart boundaries.

Unclear if GitHub has the staff or if they are able to draw from the larger Microsoft pool.

If they keep having issues I expect Microsoft to push them to move everything to MSSQL

GitHub probably _had_ deep levels of performance expertise, but getting acquired by a megacorporation comes with a big shift in culture. I’d bet that many tenured GitHubbers left, and that there are relatively few people remaining who understand the core systems deeply.

Medium-term, the more closely aligned with the rest of Microsoft’s technology they can become, the better - not many MSFT folks understand the ins and outs of sharded Percona, but many of them do understand SQL Server and .NET.

I wouldn't assume SQL Server is the only database MS have core understanding of - they bought Citus Data not so long ago.

Sure, but the pool of Citus folks at Microsoft is relatively small. I’d assume that many Microsoft teams have worked with SQL Server for years, so it’s likely a widely-available skillset internally.

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