On Uber’s Choice of Databases

  • All of these response posts seem to miss one big piece that made no sense to me. Uber goes really in-depth around the higher cost of updates in postgres, but then Uber describes Schemaless as an immutable append only data store. They created a custom database with no updates, but one of their primary reasons for changing from postgres to mysql was because of the high cost of updates?

  • This is a very good and fair response and anyone serious about tuning their DB should have use-the-index-luke.com bookmarked!

  • This really all boils down to "Ford F-150s are bad trucks because your cargo can get wet when it rains, use a U-Haul truck".

    Sure, for that VERY specific (and not very common) use case U-Hauls beat F-150s. However, I think we can all agree that F-150s are far more versitle for most use cases, up to including something trivial like heading to Starbucks for a quick coffee.

  • The money quote to me that was really interesting was this one:

    > for a rapidly growing company, technology is easier to change than people.

  • This is a response to Uber's article, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585.

  • Wow, someone who knows how to spell "key/value" (it's not "key-value").