Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SoftTalker 1288 days ago
Likely wasn't a RDBMS at all, but flat files with maybe one key index (or perhaps none).
1 comments

I really doubt that a schema like that would survive at the kind of scale SW operates at. I'm about 80% sure I saw mention of database operations in the startup/shutdown logs, but I could be misremembering.

My guess is that they bought whatever database software was popular in the early 90s and never changed.

I do know they've been slowly changing the schema over the years, increasing the number of digits in the account number, adding email fields, that kind of thing. But I doubt there's been any major upgrades.

Well early 1990s database sofware wasn't awful. Talking about stuff like Sybase 4.x, roughly equivalent to early MS SQL server, also Oracle, Informix, DB/2, etc. Indexes, query planning (perhaps with hints), cursors, concurrency, were all adequately solved problems by then.