Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. I was forwarded yet another dispatch from the... industry. A blog post, I believe they call it. It seems a company named "CedarDB" has made the astonishing discovery that tailoring code to a specific task makes it faster. Groundbreaking. One shudders to think what they might uncover nextāperhaps the novel concept of indexing?
I suppose, for the benefit of my less-informed graduate students, a formal vivisection is in order.
First, they announce with the fanfare of a eureka moment that one can achieve high performance by "only doing what you really need to do." My word. This is the sort of profound insight one typically scribbles in the margins of a first-year computer science textbook before moving on to the actual complexities of query optimization. They've stumbled upon the concept of query-specific code generation as if they've discovered a new law of physics, rather than a technique that has been the bedrock of adaptive and just-in-time query execution for, oh, several decades now.
This breathless presentation of runtime code generationātuning the code based on information you get beforehand!āis a concept so thoroughly explored, one can only assume their office library is devoid of literature published before 2015. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on query processing in Ingres. That was in the 1970s, for heaven's sake. To present this as a novel solution to the demands of "interactivity" is not innovation; it is historical amnesia. Perhaps they believe history began with their first commit.
While they obsess over shaving nanoseconds by unrolling a loop, one must ask the tedious, grown-up questions. What of the ACID properties? Is atomicity merely a suggestion in their quest for "fast compilation"? Does their "fast code" somehow suspend the laws of physics and the CAP theorem to provide perfect consistency and availability during a network partition? I suspect a peek under the hood would reveal a system that honours Codd's twelve rules with the same reverence a toddler shows a priceless vase. They chase performance while the very definition of a databaseāa reliable, consistent store of informationāis likely bleeding out on the floor.
Then we arrive at this... this gem of profound insight:
Unfortunately, as developers, we cannot just write code that does one thing because there are users. Indeed. Those pesky users, with their "queries" and their "expectations of data integrity." What an incredible inconvenience to the pure art of writing a tight loop. This isn't a challenge to be engineered; it's an "unfortunately." It reveals a mindset so profoundly immature, so divorced from the purpose of systems design, that one hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.
Finally, this juvenile fantasy of "having your cake and eat it too" is the rallying cry of those who find trade-offs inconvenient. It is a bold marketing statement that conveniently ignores every substantive paper on system design written in the last fifty years. They speak of high-performance computing, but true performance is about rigorously managing constraints and making intelligent compromises, not pretending they don't exist.
Still, one must applaud the enthusiasm. It is... charming. Keep at it, children. Perhaps one day you'll reinvent the B-Tree and declare it a "revolutionary, log-time data access paradigm." We in academia shall be waiting. With peer review forms at the ready.