[gill_bates]

Digg couldn't do a rudimentary join. I'm sorry but if you can read their original entry and not picture an almost comical scene, that you are out of your league.

Now the Joe Plump or whatever guy is telling people that you should sort in PHP. That is the level of expertise of Digg.

[steveklabnik]

I didn't read their original entry. I read an article that was basically "Hurf durf, Digg is retarded, I can do better at home. NoSQL is stupid."

I actually flagged the parent article. It's a troll, and not worth anyone's time. RDBMS is good sometimes. NoSQL is good sometimes. Do we really need _another_ holy war?

[houseabsolute]

You seriously flagged the parent article? That's out of line. While it may be wrong (I personally don't think it is) it's chock full of interesting analysis. It's exactly the kind of article that belongs on this site. Please think before you flag.

[Confusion]

As tristan_juricek commented elsewhere:

Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish. It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"? These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.

That's a pretty good reason to flag a story. The entire argument is based on the premise that others are idiots: hubris of which we are often guilty. After you've been in the trenches for a while, you should realize that there is usually a pretty reasonable explanation for seemingly stupid problems.

[steveklabnik]

I _very_ rarely flag articles. But look at this thread. Has it generated good discussion? There's a lot of hot air with no backing up on both sides of yet another holy war that I'm already sick of hearing about.

And a few choice statements from the article:

> I would say Digg's case is an example of a bottom-feeder RDBMS product (apologies for being incendiary, but why does the problem always come down to MySQL? These examples always end up being "we moved from MySQL to NoSQL" rather than "We moved from Sybase ASE to NoSQL"), used arguably suboptimally on unpowered hardware,

> went contrary to the demonstration that even a mediocre machine can beat their results.

> Nonetheless, it is a warning sign of a foundational product issue.

> Decent database products like SQL Server even allow you to include

> So either MySQL is an atrociously bad product at the larger limits, which ample evidence seems to point as a truism,

> Please get away from the compiler and save the world from your monstrosities until you have some knowledge of these basic concepts.

> Alternately you can just clutch onto NoSQL and bleat about how it changes all of the rules anyways, which is the route quite a few have decided to pursue

Okay, I'm done. Point is, dude is straight up trolling about how MySQL sucks. This article does nothing but fuel the fire of yet another flamewar, and so it gets flagged. I'd like discussions to remain sane around here.

[houseabsolute]

Looks to me like the problem with this discussion is the dismissiveness and defensiveness of people on Hacker News, not the article.

Maybe MySQL really isn't a decent database product, or not for high performance needs. How many of his statements are troll-ish in that light?

[steveklabnik]

They all are. Trolling isn't about what one says, it's about the intention behind the things that are said. Completely factual statements are still trolling if said with the intention to cause disruption.

[houseabsolute]

Disruption is on the back burner, but it looks like his primary intention is to inform, so I don't see the problem.

[gill_bates]

And you think this article started the holy war? I believe I just saw another article on his about how you should do SQL sorting in PHP until you graduate to MySQL, or so claims Digg's former architect.

[ubernostrum]

From what I read of the Digg article, it seemed they were hitting situations where doing some work in PHP rather than the DB was the most efficient solution. I don't find anything unreasonable about that; I occasionally run into situations where it's just not possible to get the performance needed while only using the DB, as does probably anyone who's worked enough with databases.

The specific case -- IIRC -- Digg mentioned was a query which required MySQL to generate a temporary table too large to sit in memory, so it ended up being done on disk. Moving some of the processing out of the DB query and into PHP avoided that, understandably resulting in a huge performance difference (in-memory versus on-disk has a way of doing that...).

[steveklabnik]

It certainly didn't start it, but I don't want to see more vapid articles from DBAs about how NoSQL sucks. I want to see actual articles about the real strengths and weaknesses of both technologies. This article just fuels the flames.