Re: looking for some real world performance numbers

In response to Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>:

> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>
> > Thomas Kellerer <spam_eater(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> >> Where else do they want to store relational data than in a RDBMS?
> >
> > Indeed. It seems like we can hardly answer the OP's question without
> > asking "compared to what?" If they're afraid an RDBMS won't scale,
> > what have they got in mind that they are so certain will scale?
>
> I suspect they're misapplying the lesson Google taught everyone. Namely that
> domain-specific solutions can provide much better performance than
> general-purpose software.
>
> Google might not use an RDBMS to store their search index (which doesn't need
> any of the ACID guarantees and needs all kinds of parallelism and lossy
> alorithms which SQL and RDBMSes in general don't excel at), but on the other
> hand I would be quite surprised if they stored their Adsense or other more
> normal use data structures in anything but a bog-standard SQL database.

Google also has enough high-calibre people that they can probably
re-invent the concept of an RDBMS if they want to. Yet they don't.
I know a particular Googleite who's a PostgreSQL buff and is bummed
that they use MySQL all over the place.

--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com