Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

The key takeaway for me was this:

"...the server goes to 288GB (16GB x 18 DIMMs)…so why not? For less than $3,000 we can take this server from 6x16GB to 18x16GB and just not worry about memory for the life of the server. This also has the advantage of balancing all 3 memory channels on both processors, but that’s secondary. Do we feel silly putting that much memory in a single server? Yes, we do…but it’s so cheap compared to say a single SQL Server license that it seems silly not to do it."

Clearly - if you are paying 10s of thousands of dollars for a database server License, it makes sense to fully utilize the ones you've purchased.

Also, in my experience, databases these days pretty much have to stay in memory in order to be performant whatsoever. I think the rule I heard from a FaceBook DevOps manager who was interviewing with us was "If you touch it once a day, it goes into SSDs, if you touch it once an hour, it goes into memory." - of course, at a certain size, you _have_ to scale horizontally with those in-memory databases as well.

> Clearly - if you are paying 10s of thousands of dollars for a database server License, it makes sense to fully utilize the ones you've purchased.

I suspect this is the reason they're using a single server. It would cost a few more tens of thousands of dollars to install another one, versus the zero overhead of just upgrading the existing one.

As an OSS user, I often take for granted how easily I can go "Oh, the database reads are too slow? Let's throw another Postgres slave at it and see how that goes." After all, that expense is usually minimal.

Why dont they just change to an open source rdbms?

They're fairly tightly integrated into the MS stack and it'd be an incredible undertaking to migrate to anything else.

you would think MS would cut them a super deal on licensing, being that S.O. is such a major site utilizing and promoting their platform, (and its demographics match who they'd want to promote to). If S.O. goes down or has problems due to a SQL server issue like this, (or them not affording another license) that looks pretty bad.

I believe Joel said that software licenses were a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

I'm inclined to agree. If you have to spend any time at all figuring out how to fit the cost of a SQL Server license into your business plan, that's the entrepreneurial equivalent of a code smell.

Not sure MS cares enough about SQL server. They would probably throw money at them to move to Azure though.

Probably because Joel Spolsky is a Microsoft guy. He used to work there and was apparently quite influential before he left.

For what it's worth, the word "just", as used above, almost always indicates that the speaker doesn't understand the problem.

I can't count the number of times I've heard, "I just need a programmer!"

That was the point, to illustrate lock-in effects of proprietary software.

There is nothing 'just' about moving a non-trivial database from one rdbms to another. First there is no doubt a huge amount of incompatibility between the dialect of SQL the two speak. Then there's all the platform specific features that the other database is either lacking or implement completely differently. On top of that, once you get everything up and running, you'll notice that the performance characteristics between the two are very different which means you're going to have to redo much of your optimization work to get back to even close to the level of performance you had before the switch.

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