Hacker News Reader

Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com