Comment by krmmalik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krmmalik | Hacker News Reader

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I had no idea StackOverflow was using Microsoft SQL Server. I guess its just a learned response but i've always come to expect some large networking site to always be using a non-MS based solution.

I havent had a chance to watch the video, but i hope to later on. What is interesting, even with just the link is that for a website like StackOverflow that MS SQL is a viable solution.

We have been using SQL Server in our own company for our projects and i was really starting to get annoyed with it. I found it to be heavy on resources, slow to respond and lets not forget cost. I just completed a project that i have been working on for the last 4 months, and the majority of the work was within SQL server. One thing i learned was that its actually quite a powerful beast.

When used correctly and in the right way SQL is a very capable SQL solution. I'm glad that we decided to stick to SQL Server. There is a lot i learned about SQL Server in the last 4 months that i had no idea it was capable of.

Big networks (banks, insurance companies) basically use one of two options most of the time. Oracle or SQL Server.

It only seems like it isn't when you read sites like Hacker News, where most of the posters are not working in big environments. Facebook is a large scale solution that doesn't use either, but their data management and caching is so bad nobody should be considering them as a best practice.

Google, Craigslist, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube and Netflix are just a few example which don't use Oracle or MS SQL Server either.

It's not about being big, banks and insurance companies simply have different requirements on how to access and store their data compared to most websites/services.

Granted (except Google) - but Twitter, Wikipedia and Craigslist are only big in comparison in terms of traffic. Most banks push more data through their network than most developers can conceive.

If you took all of the votes from the 2000 election in the United States (I'll save you the search - it was just over 100 million), it wouldn't even equal one day's ATM transactions in the U.S., and those transactions are a nonevent.

We all know that there is a lot of data being pushed in banks networks, but your ATM example may not be a very good one. The transactions you are talking about do not occur in a single bank.

Twitter in not only big in terms of traffic. 200 million tweets per day is not small, even if a tweet involves less processing than an ATM transaction. You can also consider Facebook as an example of website dealing with big data.

You might mean most banks or big corporations have larger and more complex interrelated schemas than most developers are used to.

Google appears to use Oracle Hyperion and Oracle Essbase - obviously not for their main product offerings - but they do use Oracle products:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view...

They use it for their internal finance systems, not to run any external facing systems.

Google does use MySQL for their AdSense/AdWords transactional system (ie, buying AdWords).

I do think less of Google for using Essbase, but hey, it's hard to get BA's to use anything else. They love it.

This is correct; it's the companies that are heavily regulated that have a hard time choosing a nosql solution. The flexibility of SQL means you can create a report at any time. This is necessary when the government comes knocking wanting some specific data pronto.

It's not just regulation. It's a need to report at a granular level and slice data as many ways as possible. That's why Essbase is so popular, even though it's so poorly written.

Maybe it's because I worked so long for an IBM partner and dealt with IBM customers, but DB2 runs a lot of stuff at large Fortune 500 companies.

Yes, DB2 is definitely up there.

Oracle, Sybase, DB2, SQL Server and Informix. The last company I worked for had all of them.

  - Oracle and SQL Server: chosen by us
  - Sybase and Informix: chosen implicitly by choosing applications that preferred them[1]
  - DB2: Chosen by a company that we acquired

Oh and some MySQL and SQLite too.

[1] Yes they ran on Oracle too - but when 98% of a vendor's customers are on Informix or whatever, sometimes it's just less painful to go with the flow, so you have access to that community.

I found it to be heavy on resources, slow to respond and lets not forget cost

What are you comparing it to?

Admittedly I am biased since my day job is a SQL Server DBA, but I have tried several other options and think SQL Server tends to stack up quite well.

I have found it generally more user friendly, easier to work with, and cheaper than Oracle (though Oracle does seem to have an advantage in certain types of partitioning). I rather like MySql for certain types of projects, but generally find SQL Server easier to maintain for large projects.

I have only dabbled with NoSQL options, but my general opinion is that for certain problem sets, they are great. However, when ACID is even remotely desireable they are not an option and for certain other tasks they are less desirable.

So, I think that which type of database you use depends largely on the project, but SQL Server tends to stand up quite well for a wide array of projects.

I was comparing to MySQL and PostgresSQL, although i can understand that it may not necessarily be a like for like comparison.

Ultimately, i agree with what you are saying and my opinion of SQL server has improved in the last few months. I really like its flexibility.

Some windows live properties backends use SqlServer as well and have thousands of SQL instances running, so it does scale.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

one or both of the main people behind SO are "Microsoft stack" guys, so I'm not surprised.

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