joshuago’s Bookmarks

If you have reached the age of 25, I have a bit of bad news for you, to wit: it is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world.

The RDBMS as we know it is simply not a scalable solution – its jack-of-all-trades nature leads to a fundamental weakness with scalability. Over the next few years, a number of solutions to our problems will emerge. A large portion of data analytics can be performed with SUM, COUNT, GROUP, and FILTER on denormalized data.

If we examine the nontrivial-sized DBMS markets, it turns out that current relational DBMSs can be beaten by approximately a factor of 50 in most any market. A good overview of NoSQL alternatives for particular uses.

Faced with the choice of spending time on the elegance of the implementation, or the intuitiveness of the interface, companies will optimize for intuition; open-source projects, for elegance of implementation.