This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

Scalability Requirements

Stefan Tilkov,

In passing, Dare Obasanjo makes a very good point (talking about the inapplicability of RDBMS systems to solve very-large-scale requirements):

Luckily, there are only a handful of companies and Web services in the world that need to operate at that scale.

While I believe “a handful” is a little too restrictive, I’m pretty sure that for the vast majority of applications, an RDBMS is the right choice (if simple file-based store isn’t sufficient).

On October 13, 2007 11:18 PM, Patrick Logan said:

I think a number of these ideas also apply to maintainability, in particular the ability to evolve components more independently than tends to be the case in the IT data centers I am familiar with (and which seem to be the norm, from comparing notes).

On October 14, 2007 12:31 AM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Agreed — my point is probably more organizational, or even political, then technical; reasons for choosing something other than an RDBMS would have to be extremely good.