While a lot of startups do follow your thinking on coding the core idea/next minimum piece of functionality, and then rewrite frequently as needed, one could equally stress the need for not forgetting core software engineering practices of documentation, diagnostics, and the need for a long term architectural roadmap.

Indeed, the more small companies that work out the long term product risk, engineering cost, and complexity of scaling out a reliable online service, the more your solution will make sense.

I think you are one of the few startups out there building complex core technology, and wish you all the best. I for one will be checking out your Careers page for server developers in first quarter 2011!

It is interesting, though, that most of the great properties of the relational model, like transactionality, expressive support for aggregates, single point of query, and consistency are undermined as soon as you have to split your data across separate monolithic databases. I can easily imagine that for a lot of those panelists, by the time they’d started with a MySQL database and then dealt with all the headaches accompanying trying to provide for all those great relational properties after leaving the single-instance nest, they’d feel some ill-will toward the fundamental relational properties that they presumably see as impractical in web-scale applications.

If you were to enumerate the properties (virtues or flaws) of an RDBMS, like natural language, ACID properties, aggregates, efficient, consistent query, single point of query, built-in replication etc. et. al., can you tell us where you think that traditional RDBMSs failed these panelists, and how Clustrix approaches things differently? Were there any SQL products that could have made the experience less painful? Do you think that there was a better experience available to them using some existing technology?

You also mention “SQL” a lot in your posts. Am I to take it that you’re referring to all relational databases? Or just ones that use SQL the language?