On Uber’s Choice of Databases (opens in new tab)

All of these response posts seem to miss one big piece that made no sense to me. Uber goes really in-depth around the higher cost of updates in postgres, but then Uber describes Schemaless as an immutable append only data store. They created a custom database with no updates, but one of their primary reasons for changing from postgres to mysql was because of the high cost of updates?

This is a very good and fair response and anyone serious about tuning their DB should have use-the-index-luke.com bookmarked!

This really all boils down to "Ford F-150s are bad trucks because your cargo can get wet when it rains, use a U-Haul truck".

Sure, for that VERY specific (and not very common) use case U-Hauls beat F-150s. However, I think we can all agree that F-150s are far more versitle for most use cases, up to including something trivial like heading to Starbucks for a quick coffee.

The money quote to me that was really interesting was this one:

> for a rapidly growing company, technology is easier to change than people.

This is a response to Uber's article, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585.