What's the advantage of using Google's Cloud SQL offering versus installing/maintaining instances yourself?
It seems to me that most of the features they list can be implemented fairly trivially by experienced mysql admins. Am I wrong?
CLARIFICATION: I am not asking which product is better. I am trying to understand what features Cloud SQL adds on top of self-hosted MySQL installations.
You can look at these types of questions from several angles: money, maintenance effort and quality of service.
Money-wise there is probably not that much of a difference, although it would not hurt to make the calculations for your usage scenario just to be sure.
In terms of maintenance-effort you are probably better of with using the Cloud SQL since most mundane tasks (such as creating back-ups and upgrading versions) are already handled for you.
Depending on your context, the quality of service of a 'hand-maintained' instance might be good enough, but if you need to support multiple sites then it quickly becomes a nuisance to create proper replications across the world (which from the looks of it is a standard feature of Cloud SQL).
Overall I would say it is greatly a matter of convenience.
Related
EDIT: I've learnt, and it's probably true that YouTube uses MySQL. But it probably would be the enterprise edition and not free edition. The only alternative seems to be PostgreSQL. Long question short - - Can PostgreSQL used instead of MySQL? Is it a very good alternative in any case?
Firstly, I noticed that these are the most common names when it comes to (relational) database management systems - - DB2 (IBM), Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL, Ingres, MySQL, PostgreSQL and FireBird. So, should I presume these are the best?
Okay, of the above - - DB2 (IBM), Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL, the so-called Enterprise DBMSs, come with a bill; while MySQL (exclude enterprise version), PostgreSQL and FireBird are open source and free.
As should be clear from my previous questions here, I plan to build a photo-sharing site (something like Flickr, Picasa), and like any other, it's going to be database-heavy and (hopefully) busy.
Here's what I would love to know: (1) does any one of the free DBMSs stand up to the mark with the paid enterprise DBMSs? (2) Can any of the free DBMSs scale and perform well for enormous and busy databases without too much headbanging and facepalming?
Things in my mind w.r.t the DB:
Mature
Fast
Perform great/fine under heavy load
Perform great/fine as database grows
Scalable (smooth transition)
support for languages (preferably Python, PHP, JS, C++)
Feature-rich
etc (whatever I am missing)
PLZ NOTE: I know Facebook, Twitter etc use (or at least used) MySQL, and I see reports from time to time, how their sysadmins cry over that decision. So, please don't say, XXX uses it, so why can't you. They've started small, I am too. They've made mistakes, I don't want to. I want to keep the scaling-transition smooth. I hope I am not asking too much. Thanks.
"Which is the best database" is a huge question and is the subject of much contention. I've noticed on StackOverflow there is a tendency to close such questions; although the question is interesting, it is also quite unresolvable ;-)
FWIW, I would go with this:
Use what you know
If it doesn't conflict too heavily with the first rule, use something that is free of charge
Use what works with other parts of your stack
Use what you can hire for at reasonable cost (so, maybe not Oracle unless you really have to)
Don't optimise too early. Working slowly is much better than an unfinished, efficient website.
Also, scalability is not really to do with your db platform, but to do with how you design your site. Note also that some platforms scale better when adding more servers (MySQL) and others do better when increasing your server resources (PostgreSQL).
Please note as of today, MySql is not a free project aka as free as postgresql. One of the main reason why i had to switch over to PG. (Thankx to NPGSQL and PgAdmin III, it was a lot easier than it was rumoured)
However MySql does have number of advantages related to applications,addons,forums and looked good on resume.
PostgreSql is a much mature DBMS. It is a objectRDBMS. It has been around for more than 15 years. It is not known to have defaulted on any major issues. It is well known to handle transactions running in millions of rows successfully. The most important is, it's high rate of compliance with SQL standards. Infact in professional circles, it is more of an Oracle of Free RDBMS rather than MySql of popular applications.
I used to build Ruby on Rails apps with MySQL.
MongoDB currently become more and more famous and I am now starting to give it a try.
The problem is, I don't know the underlying theory of how MongoDB is working (am using mongoid gem if it matter)
So I would like to have a comparison on the performance between using MySQL+ActiveRecord and model generated by mongoid gem, could anyone help me to figure it out?
The article entitled: What the heck are you actually using NoSQL for? does a very good job at presenting the pros and cons of using NoSQL.
Edit: Also read http://blog.fatalmind.com/2011/05/13/choosing-nosql-for-the-right-reason/ blog post too
Re-edit: I found some recent material (published in 2014) on this topic that I consider to be relevant: What’s left of NoSQL?
I don't know much of the underlying theory. But this is the advice I got: only use MongoDB if you run it across multiple servers; that's when it'll shine. As far as I understand, the NoSQL movement appeared in no small part due to the pain of load-balancing relational databases across multiple servers. So if you're hosting your application on no more than one server, MySQL would be the preferred choice.
The good people over at the Doctrine project recently wrote a quite useful blog post on the subject.
From what I have read so far... here is my take on it.
Standard SQL trades lower performance for feature richness... i.e. it allows you to do Joins and Transactions across data sets (tables/collections if you will) among other things.
This allows a application developer to push some of the application complexity into the database layer. This has it's advantages of not having to worry about data integrity and the rest of the ACID properties by the application by depending upon proven technology.
The lack of extreme scalability works for pretty much all projects as long as one can manage to keep the application working within expected time limits, which may sometimes result in having to purchase high performance/expensive relational database systems.
On the other hand, Mongo DB, deliberately excludes much of the inherent complexity associated with relational databases, there by allowing for better scalable performance.
This approach forces the application developer to re-architect the application to work around the lack of relational features... which in and itself is a good thing, but the effort involved is generally only worth it if you have the scalability requirements. Please note that with MongoDB depending upon the data requirements w.r.t ACID properties, the application will have to step up and handle as necessary.
The only good reference that I can find on the internet is this whitepaper, which explains what database tiering is, but not how it works:
The concept behind database tiering is
the seamless co-existence of multiple
(legacy and new) database technologies
to best solve a business problem.
But, how does it implemented? How does it work?
Any links regarding this would also be helpful. Thanks.
I think the idea of that document is you to put "cheap" databases in front of the "expensive" databases to reduce costs.
For example. Let's assume you have an "expensive" db...something like Oracle, or DB2 or even MSSQL (more realistically it's probably more of an issue with a legacy DB system that is not supported much or you need specialized resources to maintain). A database engine that costs a lot to purchase and maintain (arguably these are not expensive when you take all factors into consideration. But let's use them for the example).
Now if you suddenly get famous and your server starts to get overloaded what do you do? Do you buy a bigger server and migrate all your data to that new server? That could be incredibly expensive.
With the tiering solution you put several "cheap" databases in front of you "expensive" database to take the brunt of the work. So your web servers (or app servers) talk to a bunch of MySQL servers, for example, instead of directly to the your expensive server. Then these MySQL servers handle the majority of the calls. For example, they could handle all read-only calls completely on their own and only need to pass write-calls back to the main database server. These MySQL servers are then kept in sync via standard replication practices.
Using methods like this you could in theory scale out your expensive server to dozens, if not hundreds, of "cheap" database servers and handle a much higher load.
Database tiering is just a specific style of tiering. There are also application tiering and service tiering. It's a form of scalability.
What exactly are you asking? This question is rather vague.
This is a PDF from a course at Ohio State. What it discusses is a bit over my head, but hopefully you might understand it better.
I am developing a Rails application that will access a lot of RSS feeds or crawl sites for data (mostly news). It will be something like Google News but with a different approach, so I'll store a lot of news (or news summaries), classify them in different categories and use ranking and recommendation techniques.
Should I go with MySQL?
Is it worthwhile using IBM DB2
purexml to store the doucuments?
Also Ruby search implementations
(Ferret, Ultrasphinx and others) are
not needed If I choose DB2. Is that correct?
What are the advantages of
PostreSQL in this?
Does it makes sense to use Couch DB in
this scenario?
I'd like to choose the best option but without over-complicating the solution. So I discarded the idea to use two different storage solutions (one for the news documents and other for the rest of the data). I'm also considering only "free" options, so I didn't look at Oracle or MS SQL Server.
purexml is heavier than SQL, so you pay more for your roundtrip between webserver and DB. If you plan to have lots of users, I'd avoid it, your better off letting your webserver cache the requests, thus avoiding creating xml(rss) everytime, if that is what you are thinking about.
I'd go with MySQL because its really good at serving and its totally free, well PostgreSQL is too, but haven't used it so I can't say.
CouchDB could make sense, but not if you plan on doing OLAP (Offline Analysis) of your data, a normal RDBMS will be better at it.
Admitting firstly that I generally don't like mysql, I will say that there has been writing on this topic regarding postgres:
http://oldmoe.blogspot.com/2008/08/101-reasons-why-postgresql-is-better.html
This is always my choice when I need a pure relational database. I don't know whether a document database would be more appropriate for your application without knowing more about it. It does sound like it's something you should at least investigate.
MySQL is probably one of the best options out there; light, easy to install and maintain, multiplatform and free. On top of that there are some good free client tools.
Something to think about; because of the nature of your system you will probably have some tables that will grow quite a lot very quickly so you might want to think about performance.
Thus, MySQL supports vertical partitioning but only from V 5.1.
It sounds to me the application you will build can easily become a large-scale web app. I would suggest PostgreSQL, for it has been known for its reliability.
You can check out the following link -- Bob Ippolito from MochiMedia tells us why they ditched MySQL for PostgreSQL. Although the posts are more than 3 years old, the issues MySQL 5.1 has recently tend to prove that they are still relevant.
http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/category/sql/mysql/
MySQL is good in production. I haven't used PostgreSQL for rails, but it's a good solution as well.
In the dev and test environments I'd start out with SQLite (default), and perhaps migrate to your target DB in the test environment as you move closer to completion.
I am just beginning to do research into the feasibility of using Amazon's SimpleDB service as the datastore for RoR application I am planning to build. We will be using EC2 for the web server, and had planned to also use EC2 for the MySQL servers. But now the question is, why not use SimpleDB?
The application will (if successful) need to be very scalable in terms of # of users supported, will need to maintain a simple and efficient code base, and will need to be reliable.
I'm curious as to what the SO communities thoughts are on this.
The Ruby SimpleDB library is not as complete as ActiveRecord (the default Rails DB adapter), so many of the features you're used to will not be there.
On the plus side it's schemaless, scalable and works well with ec2.
If you're going to do things like full text search in your app then SimpleDB might not be the best choice, stick with AR + sphinx.
Well, considering simple DB doesn't use SQL, or even have tables, means that it's a completely different beast than MySQL and other SQL-based things (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/). There are no constraints, triggers, or joins. Good luck.
Here's one way of getting it up and running:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1242
(via http://rubyforge.org/projects/aws-sdb/ )
I suppose if you're never going to need to query the data outside of rails, then SimpleDB may prove to be OK. But as it's not a first-class supported DB, you're likely to run into bugs that are difficult to fix. I wouldn't want to run a production rails app in a semi-beta backend.
To me this just feels like, "Hey there are these neat tools out there, I should go build a project using them," rather than actually needing to use these specific tools. Maybe I'm just being crabby but it feels like a classic case of premature optimization. You're trying to use an external service that costs money for an app that isn't even written yet and you don't say you've got a guaranteed audience or one that will necessarily scale to a level that warrants that.
"The application will (if successful) need to be very scalable in terms of # of users supported", seriously, that describes half the Internet. It's the "if successful" part that's really the question. Just concentrate on building the application quickly and easily. The easiest way to do that is just use ROR as it is out-of-the-box so to speak. Pair it with a database, use ActiveRecord and get something built and attracting users.
In fact, I'll go further and say that EC2 is rather expensive for always on servers. Deploy it over on Slicehost or another hosted solution and then move it to EC2 if you need to in order to support demand.
I myself am very interested in this topic. Right now I'm on a cloud computing high so I'd say go with SimpleDB since it'll probably scale better in the sense that you'll have high availability, but that's just my thoughts as of the moment. Not from experience yet.
Edit: It's true that SimpleDB has no normal features a "normal" database, but it should do the trick if you only need a simple CRUD layer to work against, which is my case
There's a library called SimpleRecord that is a drop in replacement for ActiveRecord, but uses SimpleDB as its backend data store.