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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

Technical debt is not an excuse to use the wrong tool. This is how you end up having a hammer.

Cassandra was mature by late 2011 and we were using it in production back then (billions of records).

Technical debt doesn't necessarily arise from using the wrong (a.k.a pretty similar but with a few features less than what you need) tool. In my experience, it's more likely that technical debt arises from trying to use thew newest tool (which looks to be a silver bullet) rather than trusting your own experiences. It's surprising to me that people are willing to move to a completely different technology rather than extend and repurpose what your engineers are already familiar with.

Although, by using an existing tool, as long as it fits your needs, you'll avoid reinventing the proverbial wheel, ofcourse at the expense of learning something new.. which might not be a bad thing..

The mapping tables are used to store relationships between objects, not to define shard locations. The shard mapping is encoded in the object id.

In any case, I would have a knee jerk reaction to not trust any database system that hit 1.0 a month before I wanted to start using it, especially for mission critical core data.

Doubly so when everything is catching fire around you from how overloaded it all is.

For this very reason many projects nowadays jump directly from 0.x to 2.x :) 2 is the new 1.

But if you also need to use MySql anyway, Cassandra would be the "wrong Tool". Because you would have to maintain two DBMS instead of one. You want to minimize complexity and this can mean implementing your own Sharding.

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