don't you work for oracle??

http://www.blogger.com/profile/01908257636257717349

... in 1996.

do you know how much of a fucking heart attack that link just gave me??

haha. but this doesn't look like platypus (the real gdrive); just the ability to buy more storage for gmail, picasa et al.

(not saying gdrive isn't coming, but this ain't it.)

One viable option is: none. Desktop apps don't automatically have to include a database. Why should web apps?

The reason most attorneys advise Delaware is that the precedents are strongest there. Furthermore, it makes long-term legal costs lower because most corporate lawyers are familiar with Delaware's nuances.

All corporations are C by default. You have to file a special from with the IRS to become an S Corporation. S Corporations are flow-through entities which are not taxed at the corporate level. The reason VCs require you to be a C Corporation is two-fold:

1. VCs like to have unilateral rights and terms to give them downside protection such as liquidity preference and preferential stock classes such as Preferred Shares. S Corporations are simpler entities which only allow a maximum of 40 shareholders - as your company grows and you give stock grants or options, this won't work. LLCs only allow 75 shareholders.

2. VCs will claim that a C Corp structure gives you more flexibility. This is marginally true, but LLCs give you the same flexibility with slightly higher administrative cost but you can maintain the flow-through status which is advantageous.

The real reason is they want preferred shares and special rights. Stay an LLC or S Corporation if you don't need institutional investors. Angels are happy to invest in well structured LLCs or standard subchapter S Corporations.

Providence Equity Partners? $100m? This doesn't sound like a startup. And that means they won't get startup quality people to work on it. And that means they are doomed.

Doomed? No way! They'll get the very best consultants money can buy to build an enterprise solution that will leverage their strategic advantages.

It'll be enterprise!! It can't possibly fail, and I'm sure they have the powerpoints to prove it.

(having worked for banks/government... I can imagine how the $100 million will be spent... and I can only laugh).

Of course we always thought that what we did was right solution. When someone criticized it, it was a natural instinct to defend it.

You have to remember the environment we were in. When you are building a product, everyone wants to give you advice on how to do it. It is often very difficult to tell a good suggestion from bad one when you are in the thick of it. The most effective way we found to filter out good from bad was to mock up the suggestion (no more than 1 hour). We then looked at the before and after and tried to make a decision based on what we observed. The hard part for me was keeping my emotions and ego out of it and allowing myself to think clearly about what is the "right" solution.

I went and listened to it, and it was quite surprising. I had no idea the Zenters used to leave our meetings disagreeing with all my suggestions, and that they only implemented them to prove me wrong.

I remember them saying at the end of the winter that I always "turned out" to be right about design questions. I should have realized that "turned out" implies they didn't believe me at first.

The database is only one of a list of important architectural choices. Are you going to use a *nix (Linux, BSD, Solaris...) or Windows? What programming languages? Perl, Python, Java, Visual Basic... Applesoft Basic? Are you going to use a framework or code everything from scratch?

These answers are all important, but it is possible to do a good job or a bad job with any of those languages. Ultimately the choice of platform, languages, database, etc. are not as important as how you put the pieces together.

You might also what other successful sites are using, particularly those with data structures similar to what you are planning. I believe Facebook and Wikipedia both use PHP and MySQL. FlightAware (which does a really super job with lots of real-time data) uses Postgres.

While it is, I'm sure, possible to design a very effective site with almost any combination but Windows/.Net/MSSQL seems like a particularly poor choice. There are only a few big data-driven sites using that technology and most of them aren't technically very good. Myspace is one example - (I think they use MSSQL) - but they have horrible response times and frequent hiccups. Ancestry.com is another big .Net site but they have a lot of problems. Pages frequently hang while loading, response not quick at all and their UI is very awkward. Several of the big airline sites run .Net but they aren't very good either. Big companies whose primary business isn't IT seem to go with .Net a lot and it shows in the quality of their sites - but that's not so bad - it creates a lot of opportunities for people like us. While I'm sure it is POSSIBLE to do good work on the Microsoft platform it seems very, very unlikely.

My personal choice after having worked, at one time or another, with all of the options discussed here is very clearly LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl|PHP|Python but I wouldn't object to substituting BSD, Lighttpd or Postgres.

As someone around here said recently, "...anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't."

Go with MySQL.

Right now you have no startup, you should go with the option that will allow you to launch the quickest and cheapest. Chances are - you won't see 1/10th the traffic digg or facebook do.

No trying to be mean - I'm being realistic. You can worry about scaling when the time comes - but it probably won't.

Why's this post dead?

Hah. Good catch. I guess it explains why he thinks "Sometimes you gotta spend money to make money..." makes sense with web app databases. A more honest way of putting that would be "Sometimes you gotta spend money for me to make money charging you to support black box bloatware..."

Astroturfed.

Congrats to all the founders, the launched betas look promising.

Good grief.

I feel cheap and used, like a $3 whore.

Or a $3 piece of carpet. Or anything else that only costs $3.

Oracle shouldn't even be on the table. If you get popular at all they will try to rip you off and likely succeed. Not to mention it's a beastly system to manage and you'll never use most of its unique features.

My preference is multiple systems. MySQL for most stuff and Postgres for reporting and financial data. It's easier to scale MySQL because so many people have done it and it's simple. Postgres has lots of nice higher end database features for reporting and I feel (a bit) safer having it handle money.

When the purchase cost for both is $0 and managing them is easy it makes sense not to force yourself into making a decision about which camp you're in. More important than which you choose is learning to leverage memory well. Memcached being the easiest scalable way to do that.