>From: Marcel Weiher <marcel at metaobject.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind 
>Smalltalk,Revisited]
>Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 23:08:29 -0800
>
>Well, I have worked in a large-ish enterprise and my experience was  that 
>moving *away* from the RDB was central to improving performance  around a 
>hundred- to a thousandfold, with the bigger improvement for  the project 
>that completely eliminated the RDB.
>
>Har har.  Sorry, but I have seen very few actually reusable data models.
>
>You are kidding, right?

Who are you people getting for DBA's? :)

>>Oh, but you found one example where someone with a lot of data  didn't use 
>>a RDB.  I guess we can throw the whole technology sector  in the trash.  
>>Sanity check:  google is trying to keep a current  snapshot of all 
>>websites and run it on commodity hardware.  You  could do exactly the same 
>>thing with a lot less CPU's using a highly  tuned, distributed RDBMS.
>
>That's a big claim, mister.  Care to back it up?

And how do you propose I do that?  I worked at a very very large retailer 
for most of my career and they kept basically every transaction ever for 
trending purposes.  Now given the size of that company I would say it has to 
be at least as large as Google's data (probably quite a bit bigger).  Now 
they didn't turn over queries in fractions of a second, but keep in mind the 
general kind of queries they were dealing with.  If they were limited to a 
subset of possible queries like Google is, I believe they could produce 
comparable times.

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