Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. Another dispatch from the digital trenches. One stumbles upon these blog posts with the same morbid curiosity with which one might inspect a particularly novel form of fungus. The author laments their "sluggish" PostgreSQL, a fine, upstanding relational database, as if the tool itself were at fault and not, as is invariably the case, the craftsman. The problem, you see, is not that the tools are old, but that the new generation of so-called "engineers" are allergic to reading the manuals.
Allow me to catalogue, for the edification of the uninitiated, the litany of horrors typically proposed as "solutions" to these self-inflicted wounds.
First, they will inevitably abandon the relational model entirely, seduced by the siren song of "schema-on-read." This is a delightful euphemism for, "We had no plan and now we store unstructured garbage." They champion this regression as "flexibility," blithely discarding decades of work on normalization and data integrity. Codd must be spinning in his grave. They trade the mathematical purity of the relational algebra for a chaotic key-value store and have the audacity to call it innovation. It's as if the last fifty years of computer science were merely a suggestion.
Next comes the breathless discovery of "Eventual Consistency." They speak of it as if it's a revolutionary feature, not a grim trade-off one is forced to make when one cannot solve a distributed consensus problem. They've reinvented the wheel, you see, and discovered it's a bit wobbly. They fundamentally misunderstand the CAP theorem, treating it not as a set of constraints to be soberly navigated, but as a menu from which they can discard the "C" for "Consistency" because it's inconvenient. I'm sure their users will appreciate their shopping cart totals being a philosophical concept rather than a reliable number.
Then there is the cargo-cultish chanting of "Just shard it!" They take a perfectly coherent database, whose transactional integrity is its entire reason for being, and chop it into pieces with all the finesse of a dull axe. Suddenly, a simple foreign key constraint becomes a harrowing exercise in distributed transactions, which they promptly fail to implement correctly. The 'I' in ACIDâIsolationâis the first casualty, swiftly followed by Atomicity. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the challenges of distributed database design; they just saw a diagram on a conference slide and thought it looked simple.
Of course, no modern architectural blasphemy is complete without a byzantine network of caching layers. They'll put Redis in front of everything, treating their database not as the canonical source of truth, but as a "cold storage" bucket to be synchronized... eventually. This leads to the inevitable, panicked Slack messages:
"Why is the user's profile showing outdated information?" Because your cache, you simpleton, is lying to you. They've solved a performance problem of their own making by creating a data integrity crisis. Brilliant.
Finally, they will declare victory by adopting a "Serverless Database," paying a vendor an exorbitant premium for the privilege of abdicating all responsibility. They celebrate the abstraction, ignorant of the fact that they've merely outsourced their poor design choices to a black box that will happily scale their inefficiencyâand their billâto the moon. Theyâve managed to create a system with no observable state, no predictable performance, and no one to blame but an opaque cloud provider. A triumph of learned helplessness.
But do carry on. It is, from an academic perspective, a fascinating anthropological study. Your boundless enthusiasm for violating first principles is, if nothing else, entertaining. Please, continue to "move fast and break things." From the looks of it, you're exceptionally good at the second part.