What Scales Best?

[Tony Bain]

It is a constant, yet interesting debate in the world of big data. What scales best? OldSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL? I have a longer post coming on this soon. But for now, let me make the following comments. Generally, most data...

It is a constant, yet interesting debate in the world of big data.* What scales best?* OldSQL, NoSQL, NewSQL?

I have a longer post coming on this soon.* But for now, let me make the following comments.* Generally, most data technologies can be made to scale - somehow.* Scaling up tends not to be too much of an issue, scaling out is where the difficulties begin.* Yet, most data technologies can be scaled in one form or another to meet a data challenge even if the result isn’t pretty.*

What is best? *Well that comes down to the resulting complexity, cost, performance and other trade-offs.* Trade-offs are key as there are almost always significant concessions to be made as you scale up.

A recent example of mine, I was looking at scalability aspects of MySQL. *In particular, MySQL Cluster.* It is actually pretty easy to make it scale.* A 5 node cluster on AWS was able to scale to process a sustained transaction rate of 371,000 insert transactions – per second. **Good scalability yes, but there were many trade-offs made around availability, recoverability and non-insert query performance to achieve it.* But for the particular requirement I was looking at, it fitted very well.

So what is this all about?* Well, if a Social Network is *running MySQL in a sharded cluster to achieve the scale necessary to support their multi-millions users the fact that database technology x or database technology y can also scale with different “costs” or trade-offs doesn’t necessarily make it any better – for them.* If you, for example, have some of the smartest and talented MySQL developers on your team and can alter the code at a moment’s notice to meet a new requirement – that alone might make your choice of MySQL “better’ than using NoSQL database xyz from a proprietary vender where there may be a loss of flexibility and control from soup to nuts.

So what is my point?* Well I guess what I am saying is physical scalability is of course an important consideration in determining what is best.* But it is only one side of the coin.* What it “costs” you in terms of complexity, actual dollars, performance, flexibility, availability, consistency etc, etc are all important too.* And these are often relative, what is complex for you may not be complex for someone else.

*





Get More from the original blog...