Databases and Flat files
 
In the fall the Design Patterns seminar at SDSU will be reading the new book “Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design” by Ambler and Sadalage. Databases don’t seem to get much attention in academics in spite of how important they are in the “real” world. While I do use databases, I don’t have much experience using them and actually prefer to use object databases. As a result my experiences with databases are very limited. This makes O’Reilly’s Database War Stories series that more interesting. It has some database experiences from companies like Amazon, Google, Flickr, and Craigslist. You might be surprised by the use of flat files and custom file systems used by some of these large data and high volume sites.
 
There does not seem to be a good link for the series. If the link to the Database War Stories is to the last in the series. It contains a link at the bottom to the other articles in series.
Saturday, May 6, 2006