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by gaius 5703 days ago
That's not representative of RDBMSs in general. In Oracle we don't think twice about adding a column to a table during production hours. The only issue is if the new column has a default value and you have millions of rows that you need to "backfill" but that's just a big transaction; it's nothing remarkable in and of itself, if you could do a transaction that big anyway, you'd just go ahead and do it. And of course, in Oracle readers don't block writers and writers don't block readers, we have MVCC.

Once again, NoSQL is shown to be a reaction against MySQL, not RDBMSs in general.
2 comments
benblack 5703 days ago
That was but one example out of many. Oracle is a great database. It isn't great at everything, however. Geographically distributed, fault tolerant, scale out architectures as often required for big online services? Not a great fit. Multi-petabyte complex analytics processing? Not a great fit.

There is a set of relational database folks fixated on the false dichotomy of relational databases OR non-relational databases. In practice, they are often combined in a variety of ways. Insisting on One True Database is like insisting on One True Operating System or One True Programming Language. Stop obsessing over tools and build useful stuff!

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gaius 5703 days ago
Oh indeed, right tool for the job, I'm 100% with you there.

The issue is, from the NoSQL camp we hear about "schema rigidity". We hear "SQL doesn't scale". These things simply aren't true! It's as if someone had only ever written .BAT files on DOS and thought that all its limitations applied to Python as well (and went and told experienced professional Python devs that!).

There have been "object repositories" such as Versant for a long time. The NoSQL types seem oblivious to these too.

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benblack 5703 days ago
Schema rigidity is a canard originating with the same folks who think a hash is a type system. I encourage you to dismiss the folks who say things like that, rather than dismissing some very useful technologies.
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cdavid 5703 days ago
yes, but oracle is expensive, especially since it requires people who really know about oracle if you want to be up to speed relatively quickly. So as always, it is a tradeoff: it seems that in some cases, not having the usual RDBMS guarantees is ok because there are less admin costs, etc...

So sure, some people don't understand those tradeoff and make stupid choices. But people who choose technology without properly assessing the risks/advantages are bound to fail anyway.

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gaius 5703 days ago
If your major expense is people who know what they're doing, then Oracle is not even the most expensive platform... During any web boom I bet LAMP guys were billing higher hourly rates than people doing Oracle!
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