Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
(Dr. Fitzgerald adjusts his spectacles, leaning back in his worn leather office chair, a single page printed from the web held between two fingers as if it were contaminated.)
Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of industry, where the wheel is not only reinvented, but apparently recast in a less-functional, more expensive material. "Hash, store, join." My goodness. They've rediscovered the fundamental building blocks of data processing. I must alert the ACM; perhaps we can award them a posthumous Turing Award on behalf of Edgar Codd, who must be spinning in his grave with enough angular momentum to power a small data center.
They've written this… article… on a "modern solution" for log deduplication. A task so Herculean, so fundamentally unsolved, that it can only be tackled by abandoning decades of established computer science in favor of a text search index. Yes, you heard me. Their grand architecture for enforcing uniqueness and relational integrity is built upon Elasticsearch. It's like performing neurosurgery with a shovel. It might be big and powerful, but it is unequivocally the wrong tool for the job.
They speak of their ES|QL LOOKUP JOIN with the breathless reverence of a child who has just learned to tie his own shoes. It is, of course, a glorified, inefficient, network-intensive lookup masquerading as relational algebra. A true join, as any first-year undergraduate should know, is a declarative operation subject to rigorous optimization by a query planner. This… this thing… is an imperative fetch. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the matter; they're celebrating a "feature" that is a regression of about fifty years.
And the casual disregard for the principles we've spent a lifetime formalizing is simply staggering.
They're dancing around the CAP theorem as if it's a friendly suggestion rather than an immutable law of distributed systems, cheerfully trading away Consistency for… well, for the privilege of using a tool that's trendy on Hacker News. They’ve built a solution that Codd would have failed on principle, that violates the spirit of ACID, and then they've given it a proprietary query language and called it innovation.
"...a modern solution to log deduplication..."
Modern? My dear boy, you've implemented (HASH(log) -> a_table) and (SELECT ... FROM other_table WHERE a_table.hash = other_table.hash). You haven't invented a new paradigm; you've just implemented a primary key check in the most cumbersome, fragile, and theoretically unsound manner possible. The fact that it requires a multi-page blog post to explain is an indictment, not a testament to its brilliance.
I fully expect their next "paper"—forgive me, "blog post"—to propose using a blockchain for session state management, or perhaps leveraging Microsoft PowerPoint's animation engine for real-time stream processing. The performance metrics will, of course, be measured in synergistic stakeholder engagements per fiscal quarter. It will be hailed as a triumph. And we, in academia, will simply sigh, update our introductory slides with another example of what not to do, and continue reading the papers that these people so clearly have not.