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by chrisdinn 1830 days ago
If you store protos in your Redis keys (like most people using “NoSQL” for data storage), this comment doesn’t have much punch. Pretty sure we all can think of some pretty high profile examples of NoSQL + structured data working very very well at scale.
1 comments
hardwaresofton 1830 days ago
I'm not trying to get on people who are using redis as a cache (for photos, or any other ephemeral data).

The idea I was trying to get at was using redis to store data traditionally reserved for OLTP workloads.

> Pretty sure we all can think of some pretty high profile examples of NoSQL + structured data working very very well at scale.

Well that's the thing, you very rarely hear of companies who cursed their decision early on to use NoSQL when they realized that their data was structured but in 20 different ways over the lifetime of the product. Some datasets only need light structure (key/value, a loosely defined document, schema-included documents), and other things should probably have a schema and be stored in a database with a tight grip on that schema and data consistency/correctness. Please don't use redis in that latter case.

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dionian 1830 days ago
operations aside, the big problem in my experience dealing with these systems is you are extremely limited (on purpose) and cant do much sorting/filtering/aggregation/querying. that's what really makes true db's powerful. I love redis for what it does, i just dont think it replaces a DB well in many cases where its non-transient data
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chrisdinn 1830 days ago
I mean, Google was built on protos in a “NoSQL” database (BigTable). I think maybe you are overindexing on personal experience.
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hardwaresofton 1830 days ago
Sure, but:

1) 99.9% of internet-facing/adjacent businesses are not Google and will never reach even 1% of Google's scale

2) Proto + BigTable is very different from just throwing stuff in redis/mongo. Proto schemas are compile-time enforced, which is great for some teams and might slow others down. Google enforces more discipline than your average engineering team -- this is overkill for most engineering teams.

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