🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Hmph. One scrolls through the digital refuse heap of the modern internet and stumbles upon this. "Rich, generative analytics UIs backed by real-time data." Oh, delightful. We're letting the marketing department write technical documentation now. It’s like watching a toddler explain quantum mechanics using finger puppets. The sheer, unadulterated hubris of it all.

They speak of "real-time data" as if it were some magical pixie dust one simply sprinkles onto a system to achieve enlightenment. It just works! The phrase itself is a confession of ignorance. A klaxon blaring to anyone with a modicum of formal training that they have blithely skipped the chapter on the CAP theorem. Or, more likely, they've never even seen the book. Brewer's conjecture is not, I assure you, a brand of artisanal coffee. They want Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance, all at once, in their magical "real-time" cloud. Choose two, my dear boys, choose two. And I have a sneaking suspicion which one they've jettisoned. Hint: it’s the one that ensures your "analytics" aren't utter fiction.

This entire architecture, this "Tinybird" and "Thesys" chimera, smells of eventual consistency. That’s a lovely euphemism, isn't it? "Eventual." It will be correct… eventually. Perhaps next Tuesday. It's the data equivalent of a student promising their thesis will be on my desk "real soon now." An intellectual IOU.

And this necessarily brings me to the four sacred pillars they have so gleefully desecrated. The very foundation of transactional sanity: ACID. Let's perform a brief, painful autopsy, shall we?

• Atomicity? I imagine their so-called "transactions" have the structural integrity of a wet paper bag. Either it all happens, or none of it does. A concept too rigid, too… binary for their fluid, generative world.
• Consistency? We've already established that's a quaint, old-fashioned notion, like writing letters by hand. Why let referential integrity get in the way of a flashy, ever-updating bar chart?
• Isolation? In a massively concurrent, "real-time" system where everyone is reading everyone else's half-written homework? The very notion is laughable. I expect more race conditions than the Kentucky Derby.
• Durability? One presumes the data is, in fact, written to something. Though, given the foundational sloppiness, I wouldn't be surprised if it were scribbled onto a cloud-based Etch A Sketch.

This is what happens when an entire generation of engineers learns to code from blog posts and Stack Overflow snippets instead of from first principles. They've built a dazzlingly fast car with no brakes, no steering wheel, and wheels made of cheese, and they stand beside it, beaming with pride, waiting for their next round of venture capital. They speak of "data" but they have no respect for it. To them, it is not a set of verifiable, logically consistent facts. It is a colorful stream, a digital river for their "generative UIs" to go finger-painting in.

…create rich, generative analytics UIs…

They're so preoccupied with the "richness" of the interface they've forgotten to ensure the data isn't bankrupt. Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the trade-offs of database architectures, let alone Codd's twelve rules. I suspect they believe "normalization" is a type of yoga.

It's all just a gussied-up spreadsheet, a triumph of presentation over substance. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. In an industry that calls a distributed log a "database," what hope is there for rigor?

They haven’t built a revolutionary system; they’ve just found a faster way to be wrong.