On 08/04/2012 11:24 AM, Mark Woodward wrote: > In our drawn out discussion about databases, and most discussions > about databases this happens as well, the subject of HUGE scalability > was trotted out. Now I am by no means dismissing "big data" as a real > problem. Seriously, I worked on some pretty large systems -- hundreds > of servers. It is a complicated problem. Not only do you need to get > the most out of each system, but you have to make many systems work as > a single logical one. > > There are some businesses that really need this functionality and > scale, but, the problem is that 99.99% of the software being developed > will NEVER EVER scale to that size. The developers are so eager to > solve that problem that they forgo more practical designs. Also, no > matter what you do, it will take a lot of time to grow to that size! > So, even if it is envisioned in the business plan, you'll have > probably cashed out your stock options and be living on an island > before you need to develop it. > > My favorite example is facebook. Yes, they are a big data show case. > OMFG they have a lot of data and a lot of computational requirements. > They did not start out dreaming of big data. It started small and > grew. I believe that this inadvertent strategy helped them greatly. By > focusing on the site and what it did and *not* how to make it scale > until scalability was needed they were able to be attractive to more > users more quickly. -- Small companies that grow certainly have scalability issues. I work for IBM and they certainly have Big Data issues.
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