[exelius]

Spot on!!

Everyone has cargo-culted distributed file databases, and they’re good in specific use cases — if you have a large volume of data with a very high number of writes. Hardware and RDBMS performance have improved over the years to the point where if you’re not Google (or certain scientific applications), you probably don’t need much more than postgres. It’s completely within the bounds of feasibility of modern systems to store a 100gb database and its indexes entirely in memory. The only reason you need to scale beyond a single server in most business contexts is when you’re topping out IOPS.

If you just have a lot of data and are doing mostly reads, an RDBMS will almost always be faster for that reason. It’s also FAR easier / faster to write complex queries for an RDBMS.

[eru]

Oh, and even Google has gone back to a more relational design with Spanner again.

[solipsism]

That misses the point, doesn't it. The point isn't "maybe you don't really need nosql/non-relational", it's "maybe you don't need an expensive managed storage solution built for massive scale."

Spanner was indeed built for massive scale, which is reflected in the price.

[eru]

Hmm, you are probably right.

Spanner does have somewhat less scale than their NoSQL offerings; and even Google says internally to go for the somewhat less scale-y spanner than them. (Because it's easier to react to needs for scale laten than it is to live without transactions and relation querying.)