Understanding Nothing

Brett Morgan references rebelutionary’s comment on rb3′s response to the Salon article on how many companies end up buying ‘solutions’ that Just Don’t Work(tm).

According to Brett, people honestly believed to get VC funding, you had to be running completely buzzword compliant. You had to be running Oracle on Sun boxes, switched with cisco switchgear, served using BEA, and load balanced using F5 load balancers.

Strangely, at BlackStar, we encountered most of this sort of thinking from advisors, partners and competitors – not from the VCs themselves. Yes, there were a few raised eyebrows, and probing questions, as to the scalability of our homegrown Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl systems (not just for the site, but a fully integrated CRM / Warehousing etc. system), but when it came down to it they just trusted us to do the right thing and seemed quite impressed by just how cheaply we could do everything.

Probably the most vocal detractor of this sort of solution was David Friedensohn of BigStar, who told us at length how it would never scale, etc. Well, BigStar are pretty much defunct now, and from what I can see from their filings they ended up spending almost $17m on their web site to bring them just over $18m in sales. At BlackStar I’d be surprised if we spent $2m to build our systems to a level where they were supporting an equivalent level of sales…

Steve complains that this series hasn’t progressed in a few weeks. The next entry in the series was going to be a look at searching, using Class::DBI::mysql::FullTextSearch. But, when we used it we discovered that DBIx::FullTextSearch (which this uses) just doesn’t scale well. There’s well over 7 million tracks in the Music Database now, and searching them in that way just isn’t fun.

So, we spent a few weeks trying other solutions, and eventually settled on Lucene (which DBIx::FullTextSearch tries to replicate). It’s super lightning fast and solves all our problems. Of course, it’s in Java, so cue much playing with Inline::Java. We eventually got it working, but it’s still not tidied up to the extent that it’s a one-liner in FireCore, so I haven’t been able to write it up yet :(

I’ve also had a few people ask me questions about Class::DBI from this, so whilst we’re waiting, I’m going to put together a basic introduction to moving to Class::DBI.

Normal service should resume shortly. :)