Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. I must confess, a student forwarded me this… artefact. I found it utterly charming, in the way one finds a child's crayon drawing of a supernova charming. The enthusiasm is palpable, even if the grasp of first principles is, shall we say, developmental.
It is truly a testament to the relentless march of progress that the industry has, after decades of fervent effort, independently rediscovered the concept of a database management system. One must applaud this brave author for their courageous stance: that the system designed specifically to manage and secure data should be… well, the system that manages and secures the data. A truly novel concept for the Web 3.0 paradigm, I'm sure.
"...always enforce row-level access control (RLAC) for LLM database access."
It's as if a toddler, having just discovered object permanence, has penned a stirring manifesto on the subject. “Objects continue to exist,” he declares, “even when you cannot see them!” Yes, my dear boy, they do. We've known this for some time. We built entire logical frameworks around the idea. They're called "views" and "access control lists." Perhaps you've heard of them?
The author's breathless warning against trusting an "inference layer" for security is particularly delightful. It's a magnificent, chrome-plated sledgehammer of a term for what we have always called the "application layer." And for fifty years, the fundamental axiom has been to never, ever trust the application layer. To see this wisdom repackaged as a hot-take for the Large Language Model era is a brand of intellectual recycling so profound it verges on performance art.
I can only imagine the conversations that led to this epiphany:
Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on INGRES, let alone Codd's original papers. The ghost of Edgar F. Codd must be weeping with joy that his relational model, with its integrated, non-subvertible data sublanguage, is finally being vindicated against the horrors of… checks notes… a Python script with an API key. This isn't just a failure to adhere to Codd's rules; it's a profound ignorance that they even exist.
They speak of these modern systems as if the laws of computer science were suspended in their presence. The CAP theorem, it seems, is no longer a theorem but a gentle suggestion one can "innovate" around. They chase Availability and Partition Tolerance with such rabid glee that they forget that Consistency applies to security policies, too. The "C" in ACID isn't just for financial transactions; it's the very bedrock of reliability. When you outsource your access control to a stateless, probabilistic text generator, you haven't embraced eventual consistency, you've achieved accidental anarchy.
But one must not be too harsh. It's difficult to find the time to read those dusty old papers when you're so busy shipping product and A/B testing button colors.
It's heartening to see the industry has finally completed the first chapter of the textbook. I shall await their thoughts on third normal form with bated breath.