A step forward was made by RoomKey. You should read what their CTO wrote. At RoomKey, they made several radical decisions that gave them a very unusual architecture:
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Decision One: I put relational data on one side and “static", non-relational data on the other, with a big wall of verification process between them.
This led to Decision Two. Because the data set is small, we can “bake in" the entire content database into a version of our software. Yep, you read that right. We build our software with an embedded instance of Solr and we take the normalized, cleansed, non-relational database of hotel inventory, and jam that in as well, when we package up the application for deployment.
We earn several benefits from this unorthodox choice. First, we eliminate a significant point of failure - a mismatch between code and data. Any version of software is absolutely, positively known to work, even fetched off of disk years later, regardless of what godawful changes have been made to our content database in the meantime. Deployment and configuration management for differing environments becomes trivial.
Second, we achieve horizontal shared-nothing scalabilty in our user-facing layer. That’s kinda huge. Really huge.
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Decision One: I put relational data on one side and “static", non-relational data on the other, with a big wall of verification process between them.
This led to Decision Two. Because the data set is small, we can “bake in" the entire content database into a version of our software. Yep, you read that right. We build our software with an embedded instance of Solr and we take the normalized, cleansed, non-relational database of hotel inventory, and jam that in as well, when we package up the application for deployment.
We earn several benefits from this unorthodox choice. First, we eliminate a significant point of failure - a mismatch between code and data. Any version of software is absolutely, positively known to work, even fetched off of disk years later, regardless of what godawful changes have been made to our content database in the meantime. Deployment and configuration management for differing environments becomes trivial.
Second, we achieve horizontal shared-nothing scalabilty in our user-facing layer. That’s kinda huge. Really huge.
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http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in...