Chris Newman wrote:
>
> Or the obnoxious multiple exclamation points! I usually gloss over auctions with
> titles like that, unless I'm on a serious hunt.
>
> I really wish ebay would expand the title field. Can the impact on their databases
> be that heavy? What are they running? Solaris?
They are indeed. But ebay was architected by idiots -- for one thing,
remember The Great Outage of '99? Remember how they were down for days
due to a hardware failure? They had everything, web and oracle
databases, running on a single box. A SINGLE BOX!! True, it was a very
large and expensive box that is marketed by Sun to be fault tolerant
(multiple controllers, multiple power supplies, etc.), but they did two
obviously stupid things:
1. They did not *use* any of the redundancy controls or APIs -- not even
anything as simple as emailing someone when a power supply failed
2. They put it all ON ONE BOX! Geezus! Who designed that thing,
monkeys?!
Of course, Microsoft was very quick to jump on the media bandwagon and
proclaim "See? See how horrible Sun hardware and software is?" when of
course it was ebay's fault.
They're not on this configuration any more; it's properly distributed.
So, to answer your original question, yes, they're on Solaris, and no,
it wouldn't put any more burden on their systems. But Chris can tell
you (he's a DBA) that it is non-trivial to lengthen a field and would
throw their optimizations off.
--
http://www.MobyGames.com/
The world's most comprehensive gaming database project.
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