It sounds nonsense to me to blame Wikileaks for making transparency opponents make more opposed to transparency. When you point out a problem, sometimes the people who don't want this problem to be solved will take even more radical measures to make sure it is kept secret. Giving up because of this is like giving up fighting terrorism because your actions can anger terrorists and they might kill more people. Also it's not clear from the current leaks whether they would have been prevented if there was less transparency between governmental bodies.
Actually, there's a fairly hefty argument that fighting terrorism motivates and recruits terrorists, bolstering the "us vs them" narrative of terrorist leaders, radicalizes communities, and generally plays into their hands.
Terrorism doesn't work nearly as well if terrorist acts are treated as crimes rather than war offensives. Terrorism works by provoking a reaction out of proportion to the initial attack, which acts as a force multiplier for radicals, who are almost always tiny minorities in whatever country or society ends up being attacked in revenge.
As I understand it, Al Qaida was initially motivated by its opposition to the ruling Saudi family of Arabia, who have a close alliance with the US. By attacking the US with Saudi Arabian terrorists, they hoped to create doubt over that linkage, provoke an extreme reaction, radicalize the Muslim world, and thereby come closer to power.
In comparison, I landed in china on thursday. Today is
monday, and I have a fully furnished office (with furniture
I selected myself), an assistant and 25 interviews with
programmers scheduled for this week. The business papers
have been submitted, bank accounts have been setup.
How much money did you need to spend for all that?
Those who commented in favor of postgres: What are some of the biggest deployments of postgres? Facebook has a gargantic deployment of MySQL and it just works. The author of the answer on Quora mentions reliable scalability as the most important factor for their MySQL choice on another answer here: http://bit.ly/dm6HtQ.
What is the biggest system that postgres is deployed in?
Yahoo builds two petabyte PostgreSQL database
James Hamilton writes about Yahoo's "over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day".
It apparently is built on top of a modified version of PostgreSQL and runs on about 1k machines. In his post, James speculates on the details of the internals. Very interesting.
A better question would be: who uses MySQL as anything but a glorified key-value store when reaching large sizes? I personally have been involved in trying to use MySQL as a "real database" in the 10-100TB range and let me tell you, it's not pretty. I'm not sure about the open source PostgreSQL, but I know Greenplum has petabyte level warehouses running on a distributed version of it.
A few observations:
1) MyISAM's performance is highly dependent on certain idiosyncrasies of a lot of applications. Using MyISAM in this day and age is a very bad idea. InnoDB at least gets closer to real database behavior.
2) The "query optimizer" is insulting at best and actively impeding getting things right if you use it for much more than simple queries. Something that's more along the lines of what really large databases (as opposed to KV stores) get used for can implode the server.
Personally, I think too many people try and stick things in relational databases that don't belong there simply because they've got the hammer in their hand and it's easier than pulling out a screwdriver.
who uses MySQL as anything but a glorified key-value store when reaching large sizes?
My assumption is both Quora and Facebook use MySQL this way. While you are right that this is not using it as a real database, I want to know if PostgreSQL is deployed in a similar setup at all. Most of the people (including you) don't take into account the fact that there are many cases where MySQL (used as a KV store) proved to work, while I have never heard of such huge PostgreSQL deployments. If this was a general discussion regarding MySQL and PostgreSQL I could understand that, however, I think the post is more about whether to choose MySQL or PostgreSQL if you are going to use it as a KV store.
The introduction of hstore actually lets you do this natively. I think it's partially that PostgreSQL people tend not to try and use the hammer as a screw driver, but maybe that's just me.
Or maybe sometimes MySQL is a screw driver being used as a hammer?
Tineye.com, for those who have heard of it, also uses PostgreSQL (I set it up). It is mostly a KV store with a metadata join, but it's +1.5 billion rows returning +10 random uncached rows in <100ms.
Originally we used MySQL, which revealed its true face at ~500 million rows. Queries that were <300ms suddenly turned into 2-3 minutes because the query planner decided it would be fun to do a full scan or somesuch. Migrating to PostgreSQL not only reduced the query time of the same queries by more than half but also allowed us to scale the number of rows pretty much linearly with a small constant.
Then I did some horizontal partitioning and things got really awesome.
It's just less simpler than the home screen with a nice background, however, there is no reason why anyone would open the dialpad to carry this experiment.
