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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 80 posts.

2010
15

NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin

I’ve been getting solidly flamed recently, as have my former coworkers at Digg, my friends at Twitter, etc. about our adoption and promotion of various NoSQL storage systems. It seems that some DBAs are very, very upset that us internet kids are considering abandoning SQL’s ship. I’m not here to throw out a bunch of…

16

12 Months with MongoDB

As previously blogged , Wordnik is a heavy user of 10gen’s MongoDB . One year ago today we started the investigation to find an alternative to MySQL to store, find, and retrieve our corpus data. After months of experimentation in the non-relational landscape (and running a scary number of nightly builds), we settled…

19

Dammit, MySQL

Update May 2018: This is more rant-ish than I would write now, but it’s my only post to hit the front page of HackerNews (it got to the number 2 spot back in 2010; I saved screenshots), so has a soft-place in my heart.

20

Mysql "Swap Insanity"

Update: Also read A brief update on NUMA and MySQL. The “swap insanity” problem, in brief When running MySQL on a large system (e.g., 64GB RAM and dual quad core CPUs) with a large Inno…

27

What people want (according to Google Suggest)

Mergesort and Quicksort are two well-known sorting algorithms, familiar to both researchers and practitioners. Both are typically presented as examples of divide and conquer . Other than this fact, they are usually not seen to be very closely related. Let’s look at Mergesort and Quicksort in a somewhat unusual way…

28

In defence of SQL

SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.