Comments on: Stability, Agility, Scalability, and Cost: The eBay Example

By: Paul Vallee

Paul Vallee — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 17:54:51 +0000

It turns out Johannes Ernst attended the actual presentation and made some very interesting observations and notes about the system and the way that it works.

By: khairil

khairil — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:47:25 +0000

What a beast of a system…. imagine what it’ll be like in 5 – 10 years time.

They’ve applied the ‘Divide and Conquer’ technique to good affect. And it’s pretty clear from reading this that it’s not some thing that could’ve been resolved with RAC either. The model employed by these guys contradicts the “shared everything” architecture model which is the basis for RAC, and it’s working!

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:39:29 +0000

Szilard,
Many high end systems would move a lot of traditional database activities to application tier simply because it’s much easier to scale there as opposed to database tier. Other consideration could be licensing costs – especially if it’s Oracle database.

Speaking about Tom Kyte – he often says “If it’s printed, doesn’t mean it’s true”.
In this case it’s applicable to both – his approaches and referenced white paper.

By: Paul Vallee

Paul Vallee — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:13:51 +0000

Hi Szilard,

Yeah, I noticed that. Speaking as a purist myself, do you think this was doable at all without those compromises?

My personal database scalability experience tops out at 20 million users and under 100,000 online simultaneously. I can tell you without hesitating that even to do that required some serious out-of-the-box thinking and more than a few compromises that would have had Ted Codd spinning in his grave and Ray Boyce spitting in my eye. (Can anyone confirm Boyce is still with us?)

Cheers
Paul

By: Szilard

Szilard — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:01:22 +0000

Nice work, eh?

“No business logic in database”

“Move CPU-intensive work to applications”
” – Referential integrity”
” – Joins”
” – Sorting”

“Auto-commit for vast majority of DB writes”

I wonder what TK would have to say about this…