MySQL Conference 2012 – keynotes on day 2 (1)

An exciting and busy day yesterday – lots of good talks, good conversations and good beer! Back at the sessions this morning and the first keynote of the day by Sam Ghods of Box: “MySQL: Still the Best Choice for Mission-Critical Data”

The usual story of a (file sharing) application that started out on one MySQL instance to store metadata and ran into scaling bottlenecks. Interestingly, NoSQL did not work out for them and they ended up sharding MySQL. “If you use a NoSQL store, but need any advanced featuers in your data store, you end up building them yourself. If you’re willing to partition your data yourself, you can use MySQL’s fancy features”

Now on to specific MySQL features that Box uses, not directly provided by NoSQL:

Inter-row Consistency (aka Unique Key) to ensure unique filenames in folders
Transactions maintain integrity on file/folder renames where the whole tree needs to be updated
Transactions also help maintain consistency when modifying denormalized data
Indexes guaranteed to be consistent, fast, gets you only the required data, requires no maintenance
Tools (or – whats happening in your data store), Metrics, Benchmarking
Maturity and Reliability (of MySQL)

And just to prove that he’s not anti-NoSQL, Box is using NoSQL as well, just for different applications. In other words, choose the right tool for the right job and be sure to consider all the pros and cons of a solution

Don’t choose a database just because “it scales” (whats the trade-off)
Wade, don’t jump into new technologies
If you go with new technology, be aware that crazy things might happen
Make sure you’re not rebuilding MySQL