Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Hmph. I've just had the misfortune of having one of my graduate students forward me a... press release... from the digital playground they call the "modern web." It seems a company named after a particularly uninspired breakfast cereal ingredient has decided to further dilute the already sullied waters of data management. One must, I suppose, document these heresies for posterity, if only as a cautionary tale.
It appears this "Supabase" has decided that being a mere PostgreSQL hosting service—a noble, if uninspired, calling—is no longer sufficient. No, they have now bolted an entire identity management subsystem onto their database offering, a decision so architecturally unsound it would make a first-year undergraduate weep.
...turning your project into a full-fledged identity provider for AI agents, third-party developers, and enterprise SSO.
One shudders. Let us dissect this monument to hubris, shall we?
First, we have the flagrant disregard for the very concept of a database management system. Codd's foundational rules exist for a reason, chief among them being the principle that a system should manage data through its relational capabilities. Instead, we have this... chimera. A database that is also an authentication server. What's next? Will it also brew my morning espresso? This isn't innovation; it's a panicked cramming of disparate services into one monolithic black box, creating a single point of failure so spectacular it's almost poetic. Truly, the single-responsibility principle is just a suggestion to these people.
They speak of "enterprise SSO" while apparently forgetting the sacred tenets of ACID. Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability—these are not buzzwords to be slapped on a feature list, they are a holy covenant. I challenge them to explain the atomic nature of a transaction that involves a third-party OAuth 2.1 handshake, a local user record insertion, and a potential cascade of permissions updates. When a network hiccup causes the token exchange to fail, is the entire operation rolled back with perfect isolation? Or does it leave orphaned, half-authenticated user data littering the tables? The silence, I suspect, would be deafening.
Then there is the laughable ignorance of Brewer's CAP theorem. They promise a system for "AI agents" and "third-party developers"—use cases that demand both blistering availability and unimpeachable consistency. Well, quelle surprise, you cannot have both in a distributed system experiencing a partition. Which will it be, gentlemen? When the network inevitably falters, will my "AI agent" be told a user doesn't exist when they do (sacrificing consistency), or will the entire login system simply cease to function (sacrificing availability)? They've built a system that forces its users into this impossible choice, likely without even realizing it.
This entire affair reeks of a development culture that believes history began with the first commit to a Git repository. It is a solution born of utter contempt for decades of rigorous computer science. One can only assume they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the fundamental trade-offs in database architecture. Why bother with the classics when you can simply glue together a few open-source libraries, call it an "identity provider," and write a blog post? Reading papers, it seems, is far too much work when there are venture capitalists to impress.
This entire endeavor is, of course, doomed. It is a house of cards built on a foundation of compromised principles. The inevitable result will be a cascade of data consistency errors and security vulnerabilities so profound that they will serve as a textbook example of architectural malpractice for generations of my future students. Mark my words. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go lie down. The sheer idiocy of it all has given me a terrible headache.