The databases we use today were designed 20, 30 years ago.
Relational databases were designed in that world. They require huge amounts of work up-front (schema design, data normalization, query design, performance tuning) to allow single queries to run at maximum speed. And this made sense. At the time.
The computing world and the usage patterns today are fundamentally different.
Thousands of users update their status on Twitter and Facebook this minute, in parallel.
Doing a simple concurrency benchmark reveals that I can serve around 1000 concurrent read requests from CouchDB from my Mac Mini
This not a fair comparison though, the requests do not do the same calculations so they can’t be compared. But they are not fair either the other way around: CouchDB and the tests are not optimized at all while the other setup is a few years in the making.
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.