That's a scary idea - being forced into Oracle or Sybase. Isn't
Slashdot.org still running strongly off of MySQL?
Depends on how you define strongly. Slashdot has a LOT of code in place
to cache the content so it never has to hit the database directly.
Basically, every X seconds, the data creating the site is ripped outta
the database and produced as static content so that the writes and reads
don't clobber each other. And it still takes a pretty big and fast
machine to handle the load.
I think slashdot uses memcache...
http://www.danga.com/memcached/users.bml
I was under the impression that they also created a lot of static text
for pages that are older than x number minutes or days, with updates to
those pages becoming further apart as the page for older.
They very well could. I don't know anything beyond what that page says...
I would also read this about mysql's table locking:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/table-locking.html
Specifically, regarding myisam tables:
"Table locking enables many threads to read from a table at the same time,
but if a thread wants to write to a table, it must first get exclusive
access. During the update, all other threads that want to access this
particular table must wait until the update is done."
It doesn't take very many writes before this *really* becomes a problem.
We're implementing memcache at work to help with this issue...
Yeah, table level locking doesn't really scale well.
Which is ironic since the top of that page says: "For large tables, table
locking is much better than row locking for most applications..."
Which, just right off the bat, doesn't make much sense... oh well.
