RAM is my friend
I got a kick out of reading the Slashdot posting
Replacing
Traditional Storage, Databases With In-Memory Analytics. One of
my personal quirks is that the relational/sql model has never made
much sense to me. It's both cumbersome and slow. Give me a big
bucket of RAM and a log file any day. It's always hugely faster and
more flexible. If the database is too big for RAM,
shard.
There's a odd sort of political correctness about SQL. I've
frequently run into people with high performance transaction
systems. When asked how they achieved that performance, "big
HashMap" comes up often, and often with a hint of embarrassment.
Some people seem to think that it's just a hack that they're forced
into to achieve performance. But there's a murky distinction in my
mind between "hack" and "elegant technique". I tend to think of the
log as the Truth, and RAM as a cache that just happens to be big
enough to contain everything. There's a huge bag of tricks to trade
off reliability, scale, distribution and startup time. Pick a point
in that multidimensional space, and there's almost always a set of
tricks to get you there.
