[dennis82]

are you kidding me? There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company. Postgres is more than capable of sustaining the necessary speeds of a startup.

Relational databases were created in the first place to solve these very problems around transactionality and analytics for finance.

This library is a beautiful example of reinventing the wheel, and otherwise creating a patchwork of unnecessary - and ultimately brittle - infrastructure.

[gdb]

(I work at Stripe.)

Where we use MongoDB, it's not because of speed. PostgreSQL is certainly capable of fast performance. MongoDB is useful for its ability to log freeform data as well as for its replication model. (We use sharded MongoDB in a few places, but mostly use straight replica sets.)

We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala. They're all useful in different places.

[pvh]

Mongo's probably still got the edge as a JSON store overall, but definitely check out the new JSON object dereferencing functionality coming in 9.3. There's a Russian indexing posse consisting of Oleg, Teodor, and Sasha who have been looking at doing proper indexes for JSON but haven't managed to secure funding. (Disclosure: I think they should get funded.)

These are the same guys who built hstore, full text search, GIN and GIST indexes and I think are working on a generic regular expression index type right now.

[dennis82]

> "We use MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Impala."

Thanks for the clarification, but this makes it even more obvious your engineering team is introducing needless complexity into your organization.

Postgres can store unstructured data just fine, so you have a 'solution' that uses 3 OLTP stores instead of one.

[taligent]

PostgreSQL is awful for storing unstructured data. It is the most cumbersome, clunky syntax I've seen for a while and it lacks ORM support meaning you are forced to manually write it.

Making developers productive is an important aspect for choosing a database.

[gfodor]

Choosing a data store based upon syntax and slightly limited ORM support isn't exactly a great idea. Both of these things can be improved rapidly with a little code.

More important questions are how is the data stored, how is it accessible, how can you scale the system, what operational constraints are there, how fast is it, what types of data modeling can be done, what consistency/transaction guarantees does it provide, etc. These are the things that will make developers productive because they will not be putting out fires all the time.

[dennis82]

well said!

[spicyj]

Why do you use MySQL over Postgres and vice versa?

[monstrado]

(Clouderan here)

How are you liking Impala? We just dropped 0.5 release yesterday which includes the JDBC driver :D!

Edit: Awesome job on the Ruby client, it's great!

[gdb]

It's been great -- setup was a bit of work (we're on Ubuntu, so had to build from source), but once up and running it's allowed us to do lots of ad-hoc analysis that would have been too hard otherwise.

I've been meaning to write a MoSQL equivalent for our Impala data, but at the moment we're doing a more traditional ETL.

[odellk]

gdb - If you have Impala, Hadoop, and Hive right now. Why use MongoDB instead of HBase and make it all work in a happy harmony?

[monstrado]

Awesome! Great to hear it's working out for you guys, looking forward to MoSQL for Impala :-)

[nelhage]

We've been pretty happy so far. There have been a few rough edges getting it up and keeping it running, but we've been very impressed with the performance so far.

I've passed your comment on to Colin, who wrote the Ruby client -- I'm sure he'll appreciate it!

[monstrado]

I got myself a little Impala Herd server setup, pointed it at my Impala cluster and it's working great ;).

[colinmarc]

heh, I didn't think anyone would actually use that - I originally wrote it meaning to use it as a tutorial for the blog post, then scrapped that idea.

Thanks for the kind words!

[rdouble]

Everywhere I've worked that did high volume transaction processing had an architecture that required a piece like this. Even if you use a relational database for intake, you still need to move the data to another database for analytics. Moving the data automatically via replication sounds a lot better than the typical batch process running at 4am.

[Ingaz]

Tell this FIS Global.

There is absolutely no reason to make banking system on GT.M but they did.

Although: GT.M is the only(?) NoSQL that is ACID-compliant.

[taligent]

> There is absolutely NO reason whatsoever to use a NoSQL database for a financial services company

Yes there is. PostgreSQL doesn't support multi master replication which makes it a terrible choice if you really want to make sure every transaction gets written. I really wonder at what point people that keep recommending PostgreSQL are going to wake up and realise what is happening in the industry.

People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups.

[shawn-butler]

I'm sorry, postgres-xc doesn't work for you needs? [0] It has worked for me in the past.

[0] http://postgres-xc.sourceforge.net/

[knightni]

I would imagine that for your average startup, using solutions that don't even support transactionality will cause greater complexity issues. Especially given the enormous window before db scale out/up becomes an issue on well-designed applications.

[taligent]

Enormous window ?

Many startups would be using AWS and it is not inconceivable that you would have Multi-AZ/Multi-Region VPSs. Scaling out != Expensive.

[j-kidd]

> People are scaling OUT not UP. Especially startups.

Startups need to scale out because many of them like to deploy on mediocre EC2 instances with the slowest SAN storage ever.

People that keep recommending PostgreSQL are rightfully ignoring this industry.

[taligent]

> Startups need to scale out because many of them like to deploy on mediocre EC2 instances.

No. They need to scale out because providers like AWS have outages. And so startups et al need to deploy in multiple AZ/regions in order to have as close to 100% uptime as possible. You can't do that with a well considered multi master style replication strategy which PostgreSQL frankly doesn't have.

>People that keep recommending PostgreSQL are rightfully ignoring this industry.

Sure. And soon enough they will be relegated to the dustbins of history. The trends don't lie.

[gbog]

"The trends don't lie"

Wah. And you do not even seem to be ironic. Trends always lie, there is always a next thing that will take the opposite direction, in philosophy, in science, and particularly so in computing stuff.

[nirvdrum]

In all fairness, you could use something other than Postgres that's also ACID.