<story><title>NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin</title><url>http://stu.mp/2010/03/nosql-vs-rdbms-let-the-flames-begin.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antirez</author><text>I don&apos;t want to enter into the details of the post, but it is impossible for me avoiding a reaction to this: &quot;Do you honestly think that the PhDs at Google, Amazon, Twitter, Digg, and Facebook created Cassandra, BigTable, Dynamo, etc. when they could have just used a RDBMS instead?&quot;&lt;p&gt;It is really impossible to argument something based on the fact that people that are supposed to be very smart are doing it. The only way to support arguments is by showing facts...&lt;p&gt;shameless plug as I don&apos;t want to post a message just to say this, but isn&apos;t HN too slow lately? I&apos;m at the point that I visit the site less often than I was used to do as I don&apos;t want to experience the delay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aphyr</author><text>I think in some cases this kind of appeal to authority &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; be valid.&lt;p&gt;Facebook has absolutely insane sparse matrices to handle. They handle enourmous volumes of traffic querying very specific (read: not cachable between users) datasets. Moreover, they&apos;ve already invested mind-boggling amounts of capital into their stack. Same goes for Amazon with Dynamo. These people operate on scales that startups like us can&apos;t even comprehend; and they&apos;ve found it worthwhile to write their own datastores for those scenarios. Moreover, their use of those databases has apparently contributed to their success. That, to me, is strongly suggestive evidence.&lt;p&gt;That and HA/fault-tolerance is a no-brainer; Cassandra&apos;s scaling characteristics rock the socks off of &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; SQL DB I&apos;ve used. The consistency tradeoff is well worth it for some use cases.</text></comment>
<story><title>NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin</title><url>http://stu.mp/2010/03/nosql-vs-rdbms-let-the-flames-begin.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antirez</author><text>I don&apos;t want to enter into the details of the post, but it is impossible for me avoiding a reaction to this: &quot;Do you honestly think that the PhDs at Google, Amazon, Twitter, Digg, and Facebook created Cassandra, BigTable, Dynamo, etc. when they could have just used a RDBMS instead?&quot;&lt;p&gt;It is really impossible to argument something based on the fact that people that are supposed to be very smart are doing it. The only way to support arguments is by showing facts...&lt;p&gt;shameless plug as I don&apos;t want to post a message just to say this, but isn&apos;t HN too slow lately? I&apos;m at the point that I visit the site less often than I was used to do as I don&apos;t want to experience the delay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubernostrum</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It is really impossible to argument something based on the fact that people that are supposed to be very smart are doing it.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s been a strong undercurrent of posts which basically consist of &lt;i&gt;ad hominem&lt;/i&gt; &quot;non-SQL databases are only for idiots who can&apos;t figure out how to manage an RDBMS properly&quot;. Pointing out that there are people who very definitely are &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; idiots and who &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; manage an RDBMS quite effectively, but who feel non-SQL databases are still appropriate for their use cases is, so far as I&apos;m concerned, an acceptable rebuttal to that.</text></comment>