Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of "industry practice." How brave of these... practitioners... to publish their findings. I must commend their courage in producing such a delightfully detailed document on the profoundly pressing problem of how to read very, very quickly from a single machine. It is truly a testament to modern engineering that one can so meticulously measure the speed of... well, of not much, really.
They've benchmarked an oltp_read_only workload. Read-only. Let that sink in. They have taken a system designed to uphold the sacred principles of Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability, and have tested it by studiously ignoring all four. It's like evaluating a concert pianist on how quietly they can sit at the bench. The entire point of a database management system, its very raison d'être, is the transactional management of state. This... this is just a glorified file reader with an SQL interface. Their pathetic performance posturing is predicated on a premise that strips the database of its very soul!
And the excitement, the sheer, unadulterated glee, over io_uring! Fiddling with file descriptors and kernel interfaces! It’s the computational equivalent of polishing the hubcaps on a car that has no engine. While they obsess over shaving microseconds off a SELECT statement, the grand cathedrals of relational theory lie in ruin. Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on "The End of an Architectural Era," or they would understand that these frantic, low-level optimizations are merely deckchair rearrangement on a fundamentally sinking ship. They are lost in the weeds of implementation, having never seen the forest of information management.
I must applaud their thoroughness, however. Ninety-six benchmark combinations! Such Herculean effort for such a Hellenistically tiny conclusion. What did they unearth with this prodigious expenditure of compute?
They are so mesmerized by their myriad graphs and colorful bars that they fail to see the vacuity of their own investigation. They speak of "I/O-intensive workloads" while conveniently forgetting that the most intensive and important work a database does involves writes, locks, and ensuring consistency. This isn't a benchmark; it's a "Don't-Break-Anything-Important" simulation.
And the conclusion they draw from this benchmarking balderdash is simply breathtaking in its myopia.
My key takeaways are: ... Using io_method=worker was a good choice as the new default.
A good choice for what, precisely? A data museum? An archive of immutable curiosities? It's certainly not a default for any system that cares about Codd's Rule 9, the principle of logical data independence, which is inevitably compromised when one begins to fetishize the physical storage layer. They are conflating concurrency with correctness, a freshman-level error I wouldn't tolerate in my introductory course.
This entire exercise is a perfect, painful diorama of modern software development: a myopic focus on metrics that are easy to measure, a complete ignorance of the foundational papers that established the field, and a breathless promotion of "innovations" that are merely tweaks to the plumbing. They're celebrating a new type of hammer, utterly oblivious to the principles of architecture. One can only imagine the horrors they would unleash in a distributed environment. Oh, the CAP theorem would have such fun with them.
Mark my words. This obsession with raw, context-free speed will lead them down a perilous path. Their systems, so finely tuned for this fantasy world of read-only purity, will buckle and crumble when faced with the messy reality of concurrent transactions. I foresee a future of subtle data corruption, a cascade of consistency calamities, and a plague of phantom reads so pervasive it will make their precious QPS metrics meaningless. They will be so fast, and so, so wrong. It will be a glorious, predictable failure.