RE: eBay's hot potato toss with tail between legs

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 11:38:11 -0400 (EDT)


Gavin Thomas Nicol writes:
> Common problem. I've seen this a number of times: peope buy a single
> big, fat, fast box, rather than going for redundancy. Heck, I've
> even seen sites that want to do 20,000,000 hits a day of dynamic
> content with 3 boxes.

But tempting. The problem is that maintaining an on-line hot backup
of an active database is hard --- maintaining two very busy Oracle
servers, rather than one, *plus* the hairy infrastructure to keep them
in synch.

Yes, ebay can afford the extra DBA, and they should have paid for one.
But I can understand why they shrunk away in horror at the prospect...

rst