6 ms·
Dropped Oracle, using MySQL. Why not use PostgreSQL instead?
by hetfeld 10y ago
Dropped Oracle, using MySQL. Why not use PostgreSQL instead?
- eterm 10y agoIs there a version of poe's law for hacker news / slashdot? A large company describes their very real efforts and shares their experience and knowledge, and the first comment is "Why not use <preferred thing> instead?".
- Rodeoclash 10y agoBecause knowing how they worked through the decision to come to a conclusion on using a particular product is valuable. Postgres is usually the first choice for applications like this so knowing why they chose something else over that could influence others that need to make a similar decision.
- thinkingkong 10y agoWhen you say usually you probably mean "currently, usually" or "in the last x years usually". Netflix has super smart people. They arent just picking random tools off the shelf and implementing things without constraints for the sake of it.
- angersock 10y agoRight, which is why asking how they came to that decision (instead of using a DB dating back over three decades of development) is useful and reasonable.
- otterley 10y ago> Postgres is usually the first choice for applications like this Do you have any data to substantiate this claim?
- justinhj 10y agoAssuming MySQL meets their needs there's no hugely compelling reason to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL.
- cpollard 10y agoI know regarding HIPAA, Aurora isn't supported but mySQL is. Maybe there's a reason why it's not HIPAA compliant that made it unusable for Netflix? And cost?
- singlow 10y agoWhat aspects of HIPAA does Aurora cause problems for which wouldn't be a problem for other storage engines? The Aurora engine RDS product supports all of the normal MySQL access controls, SSL in transit and at-rest encryption for the data, snapshots and backups.
- wmfiv 10y agoI don't believe it's a technical problem. It just hasn't completed the internal AWS process for HIPAA certification to be added to their BAA. Postgres is in the same boat.
- ams6110 10y agoWhere is the intersection between HIPPA and a back-office customer billing system?
- lapitopi 10y agoI work on the Netflix Billing Team. PostgreSQL was indeed a very attractive option, but we wanted to keep a path to Aurora open. When we were working on the migration, Aurora was still in beta, so instead of going to Aurora directly, we decided run our own MySQL instances on EC2.
- lilbobbytables 10y agoAhhh, now it makes sense. Thanks for answering.
- philliphaydon 10y agoWhy would you go to RDS with such large amounts of data when AWS do not provide ability to get data out easily. If you moved away from AWS in the future for what ever reason your data is more or less stuck in AWS.
- jon-wood 10y agoAmazon released their data migration service a while back, which allows you to transfer data in just about anyway you might want to, they'll migrate data between different RDS engines (MySQL to Postgres for example), and to databases outside AWS. They even support near real-time replication to database servers outside AWS, so you could hypothetically replicate your RDS instances to a fail over environment with another provider. There's very little risk of your data being locked in now. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_mo https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_mo
- philliphaydon 10y agoUnless you use SQL Server. The dms service is basically useless with sqlserver. We can't get our 200gb do out of AWS. And any method that works without dms takes about 40 hours.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoCan you replicate to a slave outside of RDS and then perform a replica promotion during scheduled maintenance?