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0 pointsthrowaway8922383y ago0 comments

A MySQL database cluster, and a local copy of a SQL database on a single file on a single filesystem, are not close to the same thing. Except they both have "SQL" in the name.

One of them allows a thousand different nodes on different networks to share a single dataset with high availability. The other can't share data with any other application, doesn't have high availability, is constrained by the resources of the executing application node, has obvious performance limits, limited functionality, no commercial support, etc etc.

And we're talking about a product that's intended for dealing with on-call alerts. The entire point is to alert when things are crashing, so you would want it to be highly available. As in, running on more than one node.

I know the HN hipsters are all gung-ho for SQLite, but let's try to reign in the hype train.

0 comments

pphysch3y ago

This discussion is in the context of a self-contained app called Grafana OnCall, which is built on Django, which does not particularly care which RDBMS you are using.

At the very least, SQLite should be the default database for this product, and users can swap it out with their MySQL database cluster if they really are Google-scale.

gjulianm3y ago

> The entire point is to alert when things are crashing, so you would want it to be highly available. As in, running on more than one node.

An important question to ask is how much availability are you actually gaining from the setup. It wouldn't be the first time I see a system moving from single-node to multinode and being less available than before due to the extra complexity and moving pieces.

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slotrans3y ago

I don't need any of that stuff, and nor does anyone who would use this. People who need clustered high-availability stuff are paying for PagerDuty or VictorOps.

This is for tiny shops with 4 servers. And tiny shops with 4 servers don't have time to spin up a horrendous stack like this. I was excited to see this announcement until I saw all the moving pieces. No thanks!

throwaway892238OP3y ago

If you only have 4 servers, make a GitHub Action (or, hell, since we're assuming one node with SQLite, a cron job on one of your 4 servers) that curls your servers every 5 minutes and sends you a text when they're down. You don't need a Lamborghini to get groceries.

Spivak3y ago

And this is the on-prem version of those tools. Just because it isn't the tool you wanted doesn't mean it's not good.

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