Re: An article about Etsy... and a migration from Postgres to MySQL

On 04/10/2011 17:12, Selena Deckelmann wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:10 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Milen A. Radev <milen(at)radev(dot)net> wrote:
>>
>>> "When "clever" goes wrong: how Etsy overcame poor architectural choices"
>>>
>>> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/when-clever-goes-wrong-how-etsy-overcame-poor-architectural-choices.ars
>>>
>>
>> This is very well written. It almost sounds like the problem was
>> caused by Postgres.
>
> I didn't read it that way. It seemed like a cautionary tale about
> overuse of stored procedures to express business logic in a company
> that had serious scaling and operational and communication problems
> between DBAs, sysadmins and developers. The new-hires turned to a
> technology stack that was well understood. And in the end, the article
> mentions that they still have Postgres at the core.

That was my understanding as well. The new tech chief came from Yahoo
and built with his team an architecture they knew from their Flickr
experience...that is based on mysql.

In my opinion, it really means that they fail both in their choice
technically and humanly.

> I see this as a wake up call that our advocacy needs to focus on the
> case studies, like that of Urban Airship, to demonstrate how to scale
> infrastructure with Postgres. Keeping this information either secret
> or difficult to find results in throwing out or scaling back use of
> Postgres.

+1

> -selena
> --
> http://chesnok.com