Top all-time · #2277
Bret Taylor
Personal blog · backchannel.org/blogprogrammingstartups
Bret Taylor's personal blog at backchannel.org covers programming and startups. Since 2012, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data (2009)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Bret Taylor's FriendFeed post on storing schema-less data in MySQL as a precedent for document-style storage in relational databases. The comments link it as a reference and do not judge it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data (2009)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2012-01-03
- How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data (2009)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2015-04-17
- Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-12-24
- We need a Wikipedia for data (2008)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-08-31
- The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server (2009)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-10
What Hacker News says?
One of the post's points is that UUIDs will scatter your writes across the database, and that for this reason you want a (more or less) sequential key as your primary key. This crucially depends on both your database technology and your query patterns. In a single-node database or even a manually-sharded one, this post's advice is good (For Friendfeed, we used a variation of the "Integers Internal, UUIDs External" s…
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys”Submitted We need better mobile multitasking as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFrom 7 years ago, by Bret Taylor (who went on to become CTO at Facebook after acquisition): How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql Edit to add the HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496946
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Scaling to 100M: MySQL Is a Better NoSQL”Submitted Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development as a story · 3 points
HN discussionrelated: friendfeed used a similar approach https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Scaling to 100M: MySQL Is a Better NoSQL”Submitted Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot in 2015/2016 when so many choices were already available, and certainly not in an org where MySQL would just be more than enough to meet Uber's need. Besides, Uber built their version on top of MySQL following pretty much FriendFeed's design: https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql . A strange choice by itself given that better solutions had popped up left and right during the 6 years since the…
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Uber lays off around 350 more across Eats, self-driving and other departments”Submitted We need a Wikipedia for data (2008) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is similar to what FriendFeed did in 2009 - storing schema less data into MySQL: http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Goodbye, CouchDB”Submitted How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you really wanted, you could always take a FriendFeed style approach and create a document store on top of SQLite. http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “SQLite 3.8.0 Release with next-generation query planner”Submitted We need a Wikipedia for data (2008) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionShould be pretty trivial for him to shard collections across multiple databases with the same level of intelligence as MongoDB's automated sharding simply using the primary key, since MongoDB doesn't join. Not sure how sharding is the point of MongoDB, though - in most of the universe, sharding is a database architecture/schema-level thing, not a database-server level thing, and for good reason - it's pretty darn ha…
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres”Submitted How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data (2009) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCan someone explain to my why people are still recommending mysql over postgres? This is a serious question, it just seems that Postgres has more features and I cant think of any good reasons mysql would scale any differently other than it has been along a little longer (so there are more blog posts + experienced engineers) ? "MySQL is mature, stable and it just works. Not only do we use it, but it’s also used by pl…
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Sharding Pinterest: How we scaled our MySQL fleet”Submitted Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of how FriendFeed was using MySQL to store unstructured data. http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Sharding Pinterest: How we scaled our MySQL fleet”Submitted Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development as a story · 2 points
HN discussionbest thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret. [0] http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado [1] https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...
Comment linking /blog/tornado
on “FriendFeed is shutting down”Submitted We need a Wikipedia for data by Bret Taylor (2008) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat if it is the difference between your schema working under high transaction rates or not? Or, the difference between buying much more database hardware and having smaller shards to avoid index contention. (which, is $$) Facebooks mysql architecture (at least used to, likely still is) based on this: https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql Note the simple schema, and lack of FKs. FKs are rarely pr…
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “MySQL Bug #11472: Triggers not executed following foreign key updates/deletes”Submitted Vector Graphics in iOS via PDF as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis was done by FriendFeed back in 2009: https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “MySQL is a Better NoSQL”Submitted How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data (2009) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReminds me of: http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “MySQL is a Better NoSQL”Submitted How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThanks for your support. The data is stored in a sqlite3 database. The next two big features will be network awareness (that is, you can have multiple databases sync with eachothers) and custom data fields where I was planning doing something like http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql to get a fully customable configurations.
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “Show HN: A ncurses CRM system (and accounting)”Submitted Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of FriendFeed´s Schemaless MySQL. https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql They were acquired by FB.
Comment linking /blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
on “DocStore: Document Database for MySQL at Facebook [pdf]”Submitted The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
