Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of... 'innovation'. A blog post, no less. Not a paper, not a formally verified proof, but a blog post, the preferred medium for those who find the rigors of peer review terribly inconvenient. And what are we "exploring" today? "How Amazon Aurora DSQL uses Amazon Time Sync Service to build a hybrid logical clock solution."
It is, quite simply, a triumph of marketing over computer science.
They speak of their "Time Sync Service" as if they've somehow bent spacetime to their will. One assumes Leslie Lamport's 1978 paper, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, was simply too dense to be consumed between their kombucha breaks and stand-up meetings. What they describe is a brute-force, high-cost attempt to approximate a single, global clockāa problem whose intractability is the very reason logical clocks were conceived in the first place! It's like solving a chess problem by buying a more expensive board.
And the piĆØce de rĆ©sistance: a "hybrid logical clock." The very phrase is an admission of failure. It screams, "We couldn't solve the ordering problem elegantly, so we bolted a GPS onto a vector clock and called it a breakthrough." This is the inevitable result of a generation of engineers who believe the CAP theorem is a set of suggestions rather than a fundamental law of the distributed universe. Clearly, they've never read Brewer's original PODC keynote, let alone Gilbert and Lynch's subsequent proof. They're trying to have their Consistency and their Availability, and they believe a sufficiently large AWS bill will allow them to ignore the Partition Tolerance part of the equation.
One shudders to think what this "hybrid" approach does to transactional integrity. I can almost hear the design meeting:
"But what about strict serializability?"
"Don't worry, we'll get 'causal consistency with a high degree of probability.' It's good enough for selling widgets!"
This is the intellectual rot I speak of. We are abandoning the mathematical certainty of ACID properties for the lukewarm comfort of BASEāBasically Available, Soft state, Eventually consistent. It is a capitulation! They're so proud of their system's ability to scale that they neglect to mention that what they're scaling is, in fact, a glorified key-value store that occasionally provides the correct answer.
We're drowning in acronyms like "DSQL" while the foundational principles are ignored. Ask one of these engineers to list Codd's 12 rulesāhell, ask them to explain Rule 0, the foundational ruleāand you'll be met with a blank stare. They've built cathedrals of complexity on foundations of sand because nobody reads the papers anymore. They read marketing copy and Stack Overflow answers, mistaking a collection of clever hacks for a coherent design philosophy.
One longs for the days of rigorous, methodical advancement. But no. Instead, we have "hybrid clocks" and "proprietary sync services." It's all just... so tiresome. I suppose I'll return to my Third Normal Form. At least there, the world remains logically consistent.