SQL Does Too Scale
March 16, 2010
The Dennis Forbes on Software and Technology blog published “Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie”. The article caught my attention because it expresses the viewpoint that SQL does scale. I found the write up interesting, and I wanted to highlight several of the arguments presented.
First, the article points out that bashing SQL is an increasingly popular sport. Mr. Forbes writes:
In the case of the NoSQL hype, it isn’t generally the inventors over-stating its relevance — most of them are quite brilliant, pragmatic devs — but instead it is loads and loads of terrible-at-SQL developers who hope this movement invalidates their weakness.
Second, he makes clear that SQL does scale. He offers:
Such a solution — even on a stodgy old RDBMS — is scalable far beyond any real world need because you’ve built a system for a large corporation, deployed in your own datacenter, with few constraints beyond the limits of technology and the platform. Your solution will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions) to deploy, but that isn’t a critical blocking point for most enterprises. This sort of scaling that is at the heart of virtually every bank, trading system, energy platform, retailing system, and so on. To claim that SQL systems don’t scale, in defiance of such obvious and overwhelming evidence, defies all reason.
Third, he points out that progress is being made:
Scalability noise based upon the limitations of a cloud vendor’s offerings needs to be put into context: They don’t apply to most of the users of relational databases. MySQL isn’t the vanguard of the RDBMS world. Issues and concerns with it on high load sites have remarkably little relevance to other database systems. And of course the SQL/RDBMS world is changing (side note: Few love SQL, but I’ve yet to see a viable replacement). Wouldn’t it be a grand world where every desktop (platforms that spend about 99% of their time completely idle) in a corporation was a part of the corporate cloud, all seamlessly acting as a part of the corporate information system in a reliable, redundant way? A simple SQL statement silently and transparently fulfilled by hundreds of distributed systems?
But the real interesting part of the write up is the comment section of the Web log. Some are clever and others like Alex Popescu’s are thought provoking. Excellent write up.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Because the article is about relational databases, I will report non payment to DHS, an outfit with quite fascinating RDBMS challenges. Those folks and their consultants get paid I believe.
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