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Have I started hating mysql and falling in love with distributed databases

It seems Mysql is rock solid if you want:
  1. Transactions
  2. ACID support
So I would still recommend mysql for any thing that is mission critical data and is the primary datastore for your transactions. But what about derived data or analytical data?

I had built large scale cluster of mysql server storing metadata about billions of files and folders used by tens of thousands of customers daily and its scaling fine and working good, its still growing at a healthy rate and holding up.  But this requires a lot of baby sitting if you have 100s of nodes and you need to do
  1. replication
  2. add more nodes
  3. rebalancing data
  4. monitoring entire cluster
  5. Sharding
  6. Backup/restore
You have to write a lot of tooling and lot of monitoring/babysitting to scale the cluster. Plain stock Mysql will scale up to a limit but vertically scaling has its own issues. So +1 for Mysql but not everything should be stuffed there.

But recently me and my team built full text indexing on same dataset using elasticsearch and it seems so far it hasn’t disappointed me. With just 1 engineer and 1 devops guy we are able to build a cluster per datacenter
to store same data. The thing I liked most about elastic search was half way through migration we started facing performance issues and we just added more nodes and the cluster rebalanced itself.  Also elastic search has tools like kopf/HQ where I can monitor all nodes in one places.  For e.g. this is one of the smallest cluster that we just started migrating and as it grows if we see high load averages then we can add more data or client nodes.















I dont need an army of dbas to manage the cluster as elasticsearch has built in support for
  1. replication
  2. add more nodes
  3. rebalancing data
  4. monitoring entire cluster
  5. Sharding
I had earlier built an event store to store events on top of mysql but I was storing only few months of events into it. Now I have to build a store that can store events for 7 years and I dont want to use Mysql for it as I dont want to baby sit it. Our events data is way way more than the metadata. Because every change to a file generates an event and over 7 years this could be a huge no of records. I dont want to manage an army of mysql servers so researching for some database that has good querying support and can store long lived data with eventual consistency and rock solid durability.

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