Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, pull up a chair and pour me a lukewarm coffee. I had to pull myself away from defragmenting an index on a server that's probably older than the "senior developer" who wrote this... this masterpiece of defensive marketing. It seems every few years, one of these newfangled databases spends a decade telling us why relational integrity is for dinosaurs, only to turn around and publish a novel explaining how they’ve heroically reinvented the COMMIT statement. It’s adorable.
Let's look at this dispatch from the front lines of the NoSQL-is-totally-SQL-now war.
First, they proudly present ACID transactions. My boy, that’s not a feature, that’s the bare minimum table stakes for any system that handles more than a blog’s comment section. I've seen more robust transaction logic written in COBOL on a CICS terminal. The code they show, with its startSession(), try, catch, abortTransaction(), finally, endSession()… it looks like you need a project manager and a five-page checklist just to subtract 100 bucks from one document and add it to another. Back in my day, we called that BEGIN TRANSACTION; UPDATE...; UPDATE...; COMMIT;. It was so simple we could chisel it onto stone tablets, and it took fewer lines. This isn't innovation; it's boilerplate confession that you got it wrong the first time.
Then we get to the "Advanced Query Capabilities." They're very excited about their $lookup stage, which they claim is just like a join. That's cute. It’s like saying a model airplane is just like a 747 because they both have wings. A JOIN is a fundamental, declarative concept. This $lookup thing, with its localField and foreignField and piping the output to an array you have to $unwind... you haven't invented a join. You've invented a convoluted, multi-step procedure for faking one. We solved this problem in the '70s with System R. You’re celebrating the invention of the screwdriver after spending years telling everyone that hammers are the future of construction.
My personal favorite is the Aggregation Pipeline. They say it's an improvement because it's "fully integrated in your application language" instead of being a "SQL in text strings." I nearly spit out my coffee. You know what we called mixing your data logic deep into your application code in 1988? A god-awful, unmaintainable mess. We wrote stored procedures for a reason, son. The whole point was to keep the data logic on the database, where it belongs, not smeared across a dozen microservices written by people who think a foreign key is a car part. This isn't a feature; it's a regression to the bad old days of spaghetti code.
Oh, and the window functions! They’ve got $setWindowFields! How precious. It only took the relational world, what, twenty years to standardize and perfect window functions? And here you are, with a syntax so verbose it looks like you're trying to write a legal disclaimer, not a running total.
...
window: { documents: ["unbounded", "current"] }
That’s a lot of ceremony to accomplish what ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW has been doing quietly and efficiently while your database was still learning to count. It's like watching a toddler discover their feet and declare themselves a marathon runner.
You know, this whole thing reminds me of the time we had to restore a master customer file from a set of DLT tapes after a junior sysop tripped over the power cord for the mainframe. It was a long, painful, multi-step process that required careful orchestration and a lot of swearing. But at the end of it, we had our data, consistent and whole. The difference is, we never tried to sell that disaster recovery procedure as a "revolutionary feature."
They’ve spent years building a system designed to ignore data integrity, only to bolt on a clunky, less-efficient imitation of the very thing they rejected. Congratulations, you’ve finally, laboriously, reinvented a flat tire. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some actual work to do.