[erlang-questions] Twoorl: an open source Twitter clone

[Damien Morton]

Well, the relational database is suitable for the quickly evolving part 
of their business, and there will always be a quickly evolving part of 
any business, so yes - inevitability is the perfect description.

Now that their business has stabilised and they know what a larger part 
of it is supposed to do and what the performance goals they need to 
reach are, they can begin to crate a more specialised datastructure 
optimised for their (now known) use case.

Question is - can they create such a specialised datastructure such that 
it _can_ evolve, for example, in the case where they wanted to handle 
not just 140 byte tweets, but also photos and video (twotos, and twideos)?

On 6/5/2008 1:02 AM, Steve Davis wrote:
> On Jun 4, 9:16 am, Damien Morton <dmor...@REDACTED> wrote:
>   
>> No database is needed. Everything can pretty much be achieved with files
>> containing fixed-length records.
>>     
>
> ...but you probably took my comment "and the inevitable(?) RDBMS" as
> meaning that the architecture should be database-centric - actually
> that's not what it meant -- as I described previously the RDBMS does
> have a place for user accounts (not for the tweet storage). The
> "inevitability" part was referring to the fact that pretty much any
> (not all!) large-scale architecture will "need" an RDBMS "somewhere"