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by rantanplan 2879 days ago
> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

> I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

Just in time when we were talking about fanfare. Spend 10-20 minutes searching on the Internets to see what actual experiences people have with it.

Its 3X write increase? Bollocks. Usually the performance is worse than when you administer your own DB(Postgresql/MySQL). You might(or not) see some read-performance increase, which... well everyone can scale on reads so I don't see the point.

I suspect it has other goodies pertaining to administration/provisioning, but performance/scaling is not one of them.

2 comments

>> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

> Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

Traditional relational databaases have indeed solved many issues that some newer datastores struggle with. But the flip side is that it is non-trivial to design traditional databases that are not Single Points Of Failure.

Storing data is surprizingly hard in a cloud environment, and involves trade-offs. Reaching a comprehensive solution (fast, HA, consistent, easily recoverable, scalable volum, evolvable schemas...) is hard no matter what technology you pick.

Not being able to handle more than a few connections without connection pooling is nothing to do the using SQL. It is just a different bit of optimization that is needed to support fast transient connections without pooling.