I actually was responsible for that system, and moving away from BDB's being pushed to servers sometime in '00 or so.
As you said, these weren't really databases by any stretch of the imagination, simply snapshots, and built for a very specific type of query. (by asin, by time, reverse ordered)
The building of the DB's was a pain in the ass, because the sheer scale of them was so big that you had to do clean builds (instead of incrementals) fairly often without them wasting space. There was also all sorts of voodoo magic going on to work around various BDB issues.
The system did eventually move to a service architecture (as all of AMZN did), for two main reasons:
1) pushing that much data to more and more servers was getting insane, even on their inner networks.
2) we wanted faster turnaround for new reviews
3) rebuilding the BDBs was becoming more and more cumbersome with scale
All that said, the original system did take us pretty darn far, both in scalability of traffic and scalability of data, farther than most websites will ever reach.
Fun times working there, you really get to work on some unique problems.
I actually was responsible for that system, and moving away from BDB's being pushed to servers sometime in '00 or so.
As you said, these weren't really databases by any stretch of the imagination, simply snapshots, and built for a very specific type of query. (by asin, by time, reverse ordered)
The building of the DB's was a pain in the ass, because the sheer scale of them was so big that you had to do clean builds (instead of incrementals) fairly often without them wasting space. There was also all sorts of voodoo magic going on to work around various BDB issues.
The system did eventually move to a service architecture (as all of AMZN did), for two main reasons:
1) pushing that much data to more and more servers was getting insane, even on their inner networks.
2) we wanted faster turnaround for new reviews
3) rebuilding the BDBs was becoming more and more cumbersome with scale
All that said, the original system did take us pretty darn far, both in scalability of traffic and scalability of data, farther than most websites will ever reach.
Fun times working there, you really get to work on some unique problems.