Storage Systems for High Scalable Systems presentation

The High Scalable Systems (i.e. Websites) such as: Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. need high scalable storage system that can deal with huge amount of data with high availability and reliability. Building large systems on top of a traditional RDBMS data storage layer is no longer good enough. This presentation explores the landscape of new technologies available today to augment your data layer to improve performance and reliability.

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Comments

[Jon Stephens]

So while amusing to read a few pages about why databases suck the presentation is extremely bias. While it's nice having many large distributed data stores some applications require things like "give me all people who have brown hair, one ear and sort them by length of their right pinky finger and belt size." Doing distributed key-value stores still required some middle tier to collect everyone that matches all possible conditions and then do a sort to determine correct ordering of the recordset. Where as a traditional database will have indexes already built of the data and can give you the data in a reasonable time.

Course these things vary with size of data and such. Granted most of the people who get easily awed by these things probably don't have more than a few gigs of data and are just dreaming of needing to scale anyways.

Also very large systems like Google won't actually show you the "complete" recordset. They fudge the result to a degree in the interest of performance. So there's trade-offs. You also have to consider things like PCI compliance and the ability to reliably complete a transaction (financial district won't talk to you unless you can even consider doing something like that). So again a key-value store doesn't even apply, so why bring it up?

I think the presentation aimed at one thing and should have left all of the sassing of other technologies out of it.