Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
(He leans back in a squeaky, patched-up office chair, the kind that was probably decommissioned in 1998. He takes a long, loud slurp from a coffee mug stained with the ghosts of a thousand refills and squints at the screen.)
Well, isn't that just precious. The Shakespeare of SQL has graced us with a sonnet. "A unique constraint specifies, one or more columns as unique it identifies." My God, it's beautiful. I haven't seen prose that moving since I read the error codes in a COBOL compiler manual. You kids and your... content.
Back in my day, we didn't have time to write database haikus. We were too busy physically loading tape reels for a backup, praying to the computing gods that the damn thing wouldn't get eaten by the drive. You ever spent a weekend manually restoring a terabyte of data from 4mm DAT tapes because some hotshot programmer "optimized" a query and dropped the master customer table? No? Then don't talk to me about constraints.
This whole article reads like someone just discovered fire and is trying to explain it to a dragon. Uniqueness! What a concept! Groundbreaking. I'm pretty sure we were hashing that out on a DB2 install on an IBM 3090 mainframe while you were still trying to figure out how not to eat paste. We defined primary keys on punch cards, son. You drop that stack of cards, and your "uniqueness" is scattered across the linoleum floor along with your career prospects.
And this line here... oh, this is my favorite.
It is satisfied only when rows unfold...
Unfold? What are we doing here, database origami? Rows don't "unfold." They're blocks of data sitting on a spinning rust platter, located by a read/write head that moves faster than your last "agile" sprint. The only thing that "unfolded" in my day was the ream of green bar paper from the line printer after a batch job finally finished, usually 12 hours after it was supposed to.
You see, this is the problem with you lot. You've abstracted everything away so much you don't even know what the machine is doing anymore. You treat the database like some magical cloud genie that grants your wishes. You've forgotten the fundamentals. That's why every five years you "invent" something we were already doing.
Congratulations. You've spent a decade and billions in venture capital to reinvent the 1985 version of Oracle. I'm so proud.
And a primary key is a unique one that says "PRIMARY KEY in its defined way." As opposed to what, the mystical, undefined way? Is there a secret handshake? A special incantation you have to mutter to the server rack? The clarity here is just... staggering. It's like a corporate mission statement written by Yoda.
Mark my words. The same team that wrote this will be rolling out their new "Hyper-Dynamic Relationship Fabric" in six months. It'll promise to "synergize data paradigms" and "disrupt the query-response lifecycle." It'll be a mess of half-baked ideas that ignores 40 years of computer science, and when it all comes crashing down in a heap of non-unique, "unfolded" data, they'll come looking for some old relic like me.
And I'll be right here. Probably trying to find an EBCDIC-to-ASCII converter to read the data off the emergency backup tape I told them to make.