Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. I happened upon a missive from the engineering trenches, a veritable cri de cĆur about the Sisyphean task of⊠compiling software. It seems the modern data practitioner, having triumphantly cast off the "shackles" of relational theory, now finds their days consumed by the arcane arts of wrestling with C++ header files. Itâs almost enough to make one pity them. Almost.
While these artisans of the command line meticulously document their struggles, one can't help but observe that their focus is, to put it charitably, misplaced. It's the scholarly equivalent of debating the optimal placement of a thumbtack on a blueprint for a structurally unsound bridge.
First, we have this profound lamentation over missing includes like <cstdint>. They require patchesâpatches!âto compile older versions. One must wonder, if your system's integrity is so fragile that a single missing header file from a decade ago causes a cascading failure, perhaps the issue isn't the header file. Perhapsâand I am merely postulating hereâthe entire architectural philosophy, which prioritizes "moving fast" over building something that endures, is fundamentally flawed. This is what happens when you ignore the concept of a formal information model; your system decays into a pile of loosely-coupled, brittle dependencies.
The author then stumbles upon a rather startling revelation: Postgres, written in C, is easier to build. Groundbreaking analysis. Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on INGRES, which laid out the principles for a robust, extensible system decades ago. The choice of language is a tertiary concern when the underlying design is sound. Instead, they celebrate the simplicity of C not as a testament to Postgres's stable architecture, but as a lucky escape from the self-inflicted complexities of C++, a language they chose for its supposed "performance" and now pay for with their time and sanity. Itâs a beautiful irony.
And what are they compiling with such effort? RocksDB. A key-value store. How... quaint. Theyâve abandoned Coddâs twelve rulesâgood heavens, theyâve abandoned Rule Zero!âto build what amounts to a distributed hash table with delusions of grandeur. They sacrifice the mathematical certainty of the relational model for a system that offers few, if any, guarantees. Is it any wonder the implementation is a house of cards? They are so concerned with the physical storage layer that they've forgotten the logical one entirely.
The entire endeavor is framed as a hunt for "performance regressions." A frantic search for lost microseconds while completely ignoring the catastrophic regression of their entire field back to the pre-1970s era of navigational databases. They fiddle with link-time optimization while blithely violating the principles of ACID at every turn, trading Consistency for a specious and often illusory Availability. As the CAP theorem tried to explain to a world that refuses to listen, you cannot have everything. This obsession with raw speed over correctness is a disease. And their "solution"?
tl;dr - if you maintain widely used header files... consider not removing that include that you don't really need...
Astonishing. They summarize their systemic architectural failures with a "tl;dr" and a polite suggestion to stop cleaning up code. The lack of intellectual rigor is, frankly, breathtaking.
It's all so painfully predictable. This entire ecosystem, built on a foundation of transient buzzwords and a willful ignorance of foundational papers, will inevitably implode under the weight of its own technical debt. Itâs not a matter of if this house of cards will collapse, but whether theyâll be able to compile the monitoring tools to watch it burn.