salsakran

Scaling a Q&A site and scaling a social network have very very little in common.

StackEx is also 2 orders of magnitude smaller than MySpace at its peak.

This is basically an abdication of any attempts at making certain a patent is valid on the part of the PO.

Their job will be reduced to simply checking that the format and wording is in order and making sure there's a timestamp.

see twitter's Rainbird for what a production scale solution looks like. 100k writes per second, with a huge skew in which rows get hit.

This is awesome, though I want to hear more about how the properties field is used.

Not really.

If you have a bunch of counters, you don't want a hot counter to require a transaction every time you want to increment a page view. I'm sure there's a solution in high end DBs, but in mysql/postgres UPDATE somecounter SET value = value + 1 typically ends up being very painful for any significant write load. With Redis and Mongo, there are "atomic" increment operations that do a +X on a given field of a list or hash that is very fast.

As far as "Atomic Datasets", he's referring to the ability to send off an atomic operation against a data structure. Yes, you can fake this by normalizing and storing it in a table (or any number of other permutations), but for counters, the ability to fire off an atomic increment is very useful.

I haven't used openlazlo, but SmartClient is slow on the client. Ditto a lot of the current set of heavy "desktop app" client side frameworks. As soon as you get out of developer class machines things get brutally unusable.