Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of "move fast and break things," where the "things" being broken are, as usual, decades of established computer science principles. I must confess, reading this was like watching a toddler discover that a hammer can be used for something other than its intended purposeâfascinating in a horrifying, destructive sort of way. One sips one's tea and wonders where the parents are. Let us dissect this... masterpiece of modern engineering.
First, the data model itself is a profound act of rebellion against reason. Theyâve managed to create a single document structure that joyously violates First Normal Form by nesting a repeating group of operations within an account. Bravo. Codd must be spinning in his grave at a velocity sufficient to generate a modest amount of clean energy. This isn't a "one-to-many relationship"; it's a filing cabinet stuffed inside another filing cabinet, a design so obviously flawed that it creates the very performance problems (unbounded document growth, update contention) they later congratulate themselves for "solving" with a fancy index.
This so-called "benchmark" is a jejune parlor trick, not a serious evaluation. A single, highly-specific read query that perfectly aligns with a carefully crafted index? How⊠convenient. They boast of this being an "OLTP scenario", which is an insult to the term. Where is the transactional complexity? The concurrent writes to the same account? The analysis of throughput under load? This is akin to boasting about a car's top speed while only ever driving it downhill, with a tailwind, for ten feet. Itâs a solution in search of a trivial problem.
The crowing about the index is particularly rich. "Secondary indexes are essential," they proclaim, as if theyâve unearthed some forgotten arcane knowledge. My dear boy, we know. What is truly astonishing is using a multikey index to paper over the cracks of your fundamentally denormalized schema. Youâve created a data structure that is difficult to query in any other way, and then celebrate the fact that a specific tool, when applied just so, makes your one chosen query fast. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on schema design; theyâre too busy reinventing the flat tire.
And what of our dear old friends, the ACID properties? They seem to have been unceremoniously left by the roadside. The entire discussion is a frantic obsession with latency, with not a single whisper about Consistency or Isolation. The CAP theorem, it seems, has been interpreted as a multiple-choice question where they gleefully circle 'A' and 'P' and pretend 'C' was never an option. This fetishization of speed above all else leads to systems that are fast, available, and wrong. But hey, at least the wrong answer arrives in 3 milliseconds.
Finally, the sheer audacity of presenting this as a demonstration of "scalability" is breathtaking. Theyâve scaled a single, simple query against a growing dataset. They have not demonstrated the scalability of a system. What happens when business requirements change and a new query is needed? One that canât use this bespoke index? The entire house of cards collapses. This isn't scalability; it's a brittle optimization, a testament to a generation that prefers clever hacks to sound architectural principles because, heaven forbid, one might have to read a paper published before the last fiscal quarter.
This isnât a benchmark; it's a confession of ignorance, printed for all the world to see. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go lie down. The sheer intellectual barbarism of it all has given me a terrible headache.