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Yeah, but generally only when you're actually correct. If you're not, you look like an idiot. Apparently the parent hasn't heard of column-store relational databases (which are kinda great for time series).

(I'm most familiar with SQL Server; DB2 and Oracle apparently have similar functionality.)

Apparently their 3-5TB time series table chokes ‘dinosaur’ relational databases. For a time series table you should almost certain be using a column-store index with CREATE CLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX. Depending on how much they're querying vs inserting, that alone could prevent SQL Server from choking. If it's more insertion-heavy, but they still need to run a lot of ad-hoc queries, SQL Server 2016 supports using a nonclustered column-store index alongside a row-store. You can insert with the row-store and query with the column-store. If it's still choking with that, it might be time to check out the database structure and see what's up. One of the more common killers is putting a lot of data in the time series table. Generally it's more efficient to have a clustered column-store index table that contains the timestamp and ids to metadata, and keep the metadata itself in row-store tables with appropriate indexes.



of course I've heard of column store relational databases, but they're not nearly as efficient nor scalable as Cassandra which has been built from the ground up for this. Fact is, if you don't need referential integrity, there is absolutely no need to pay the massive complexity overhead and horizontal scalability penalties that the relational databases incur.

Separately it is absolutely correct that a comment that asserts that 4 relational databases are the only serious ones is completely misguided and deserves a robust rebuke.




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