[onlypositive]

MySQL master slave replication has failover, so it is technically highly available, especially if you have multiple slaves. It was also best practice back then so this argument is kind of weird.

Also, whether you need a highly available database for a company like yelp is an implementation detail.

Oh no, the database is down, how will Jonny decide where to go for lunch now?!

[Kototama]

Cassandra is more close to AP whereas MySQL with clustering is more like CP. So they serve different purpose. See this nice discussion on Stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36404765/why-isnt-rdbms-...

> Also, whether you need a highly available database for a company like yelp is an implementation detail.

You surely know better than them what they need, that's impressive.