[rwultsch]

“Introduced in 2013, HBase was Pinterest’s first NoSQL datastore.”

I don’t think this is correct. When I started in late 2013 Redis was being used as a persistent data store. And what pain it was. I convinced leadership in late 2014 this was a bad and they had me keep it alive until it was replaced by MySQL in mid 2015.

HBase was nothing but pain at Facebook where it was supposed to replace MySQL and then Pinterest where… I think there was hope it would replace MySQL. Once I automated MySQL at Pinterest I think it wasn’t so bad, particularly given the absurdly limited staff they gave the problem.

[softwaredoug]

I had a (low traffic) app with Redis as the only data store, that we'd periodically dump to disk and copy the dump off for backup. It was... not great for anyone who was used to maintaining a normal web app. And it broke down because the underlying relationships we mostly cared about were, in fact, relational. So you got a lot of duplication / nesting, homegrown hierarchy, or pointers to other areas in Redis...