ReadWriteEnterprise

The huge problem for online services is that traditional SQL database managers don't scale up when database sizes approach "exascale" - the tremendous and fast-growing repositories needed by services like Facebook and Twitter. There's nothing conceptually wrong with SQL, it's just that the underlying RDBMS architecture does not perform well with these tremendous workloads.

Simpler database constructs can handle bigger workloads, as long as the work they do stays more along the lines of simple storage and retrieval and doesn't get too analytical. Today, a new vendor named DataStax whose backers include Rackspace is launching a commercial rendition of an exascale database manager that marries an open source database manager project launched at Facebook with an open source distributed processing project started at Google.