Developer’s Corner - The SimpleDB Question
Monday, 11 August 2008
Our Database makes me nervous.
I mean, it’d be fine for a blog or a picture hosting site, but because of the format of the database, we could easily expect hundreds of thousands of database records within 6 months. I am not a Database Administrator, and don’t have much interest in learning about building a MYSQL server cluster (Which is currently the standard answer for websites with large databases). So unless I’m interested in entering a world of hurt in a few months, I need to take a long hard look at my options.
Currently the most attractive option is SimpleDB from Amazon Web Services. It’s a database whose hardware I don’t have to manage. It’s like using the electrical company vs having your own generator. A generator is loud, smells, has to be stored somewhere, and has to be refueled. With an electrical company you install your lines, and just pay the bill, no worries (unless there’s a blackout).
One of my failings is that I take things for granted. When something works I don’t try to learn every little detail about it. If it breaks I learn everything I have to fix it, and nothing more. Needless to say, I have no idea about the inner guts of CakePHP. I understand the principles, and I can understand the code if I need to find anything, but I haven’t digested every single page of the code.
So in order to use SimpleDB, I would have to extensively learn about SimpleDB itself and then extensively learn about building custom Database Objects (DBO’s) in CakePHP. Then I would have to build and test a DBO which could take weeks (if not months If I’m moving slowly).
Nothing worth doing is easily done somebody said once, and that probably applies to this. I’ll try to balance out the development of this solution, and the introduction of new features as much as possible, so our dedicated user base isn’t alienated (dedicated user base? we haven’t registered a single person yet! Speaking of which who am I writing all this too anyway?)
I’m glad I could share a pocket of cheer with you.
No. 1 — October 14th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hi - wish you had a support (and suggestions) channel, hence this post - I think this site is _fantastic_ idea, but tried to post a submission on “The Flight of the Second Chance” and it twice told me my submission was too long, despite it being 200 and then 199 words : ) Please help.
On a related note, why not allow an author to accept a submission after a certain length of time, even if there hasn’t been another submission for that part of the story, it would stop stories stalling for lack of contributions, but still allow you to collaborate wth one other author : )