Comment by dijit

9 years ago

>Oh and don't assume my history thanks, you know nothing of it.

I'm going to attempt to be constructive here, but of course I'm biased so please take it with a grain of salt.

I cannot look past the words you speak, they are how I form an opinion of you on the internet. I cannot see your history, I cannot see your face/body language. Your words are your personality, they show your experience.

What you've said reminds me of similar people I know who have a distinct lack of experience, so, I lump you into that category.

In an attempt to understand you better I have peeked into your comment history. I can honestly say that I've not seen as much arrogance and bitterness for quite some time on hackernews.

Instead of trying to be snide and assuming you're better than people, or trying to passive-aggressively "win" a conversation.. Why don't we try to extract as much understanding or knowledge from every interaction on HN as possible.

most people on hackernews have some strong technical background, we have people here who are absolutely the forefront of their industry posting as regular users (Bryan Cantrill and Branden Gregg come to mind) which is absolutely humbling.

Now, with that out of the way, I invite you to read the topic.

"DynamoDB cannot store empty strings"

contrast that to your comment

>"NOSQL database on the other hand, completely different scenario. Exporting is a much more steamlined process."

NOSQL solutions aren't comparable if they handle types differently, they suffer most, if not all, of the conversion problems of relational databases.

The problem I faced when converting database solution was always types... Triggers, views and other relational-isms are a one-time investment fix.. converting types can easily lead to corruption of a few columns for a few rows.. how do you check that?

The answer is writing a lot of tests, and doing things especially carefully and incrementally.

and also, optimising for more revenue is not being cash-strapped, it's being wise enough to be able to reinvest capital in a new venture.. it's incredibly unwise to throw money up the wall for no reason other than it would cost a lot more to switch away due to vendor lock-in. (which is a reason not to move in of itself) which is what I'm warning about.

Please don't lecture on experience, it reeks of hubris. The fact the you suggest someone buys their own hardware to run a database to support their business is somehow cheaper shows a lack of understanding in regards to the difficulties companies face and the risks of managing a database inhouse.

You speak in absolute terms that are simply not true. Choosing DynamoDB as your datastore does not mean you have to pay Amazon forever. Databases can be exported successfully. Costs can vary dramatically so don't assume it will blow the budget.

Amazon has a large repository of documentation in regards to exporting data and there is huge online community for AWS support and third-party tools. If you are as experienced as you claim to be, you would know these are big factors when choosing a platform to serve your data.

These benefits along with an incredible array of services, reliability, security, ease of configuration, reduced licensing costs, scalability and support coupled with the wealth of talented people available who are well versed in AWS would be enough to persuade most companies towards this choice. Thus why it is the most popular choice to host data at the moment and why most companies are moving away from in house databases. Thats not an opinion, thats fact.