Ask HN: What kind of database to use for a Facebook like social network?

3 points by tiuPapa 8y ago ↗ HN

I am a self-teaching beginner. I am not asking this question to build the next facebook but to understand when should a particular kind of DB be used. Does using a graph database for users and a NoSQL database for the contents, posts, etc, while using an SQL to establish the relations between a user and their contents make sense? Or is using an RDBMS always the way to go and only start looking for alternatives when you hit a wall?

2 comments

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ljquintanilla 8y ago ↗

Give this a look

https://neo4j.com/

brudgers 8y ago ↗

If I were architecting such a system, I would start with one database. The analogy I would make is to Twitter which ran on Ruby on Rails as long as it could and only changed when it had to change. The reasons it had to change were driven by customer utility not future proofing engineering.