🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes. I’ve just finished perusing this… charming little artifact from the web. One must concede a certain novelty to these dispatches from the industry front lines. It’s rather like receiving a postcard from a distant, slightly chaotic land where the laws of physics are treated as mere suggestions.

It is truly commendable to see such enthusiasm for "delving into the specifics." Most practitioners, I find, are content to treat their systems as magical black boxes. So, one must applaud the author’s initiative in actually trying to understand the machinations of their chosen tool, even if the tool itself is a monument to forsaking first principles.

The exploration begins with a "dynamic index," which is a wonderfully inventive term for what we in academia call “abdicating one’s responsibility to define a schema.” The notion that one would simply throw unstructured data at a system and trust it to figure things out is a testament to the boundless optimism of the modern developer. It’s a bold strategy, I’ll grant them that.

And the data itself! Glyphs. Emojis. One stores a document containing "🍏 🍌 🍊". It’s refreshing, I suppose. For decades, we labored under the delusion that a database was for storing, you know, data. Clearly, we were thinking too small. Why bother with the tedious constraints of Codd’s Normal Forms when you can simply index a series of fruit-based pictograms? The referential integrity checks must be a sight to behold.

The author’s discovery that the search indexes and the actual data live in two entirely separate systems (Lucene and WiredTiger) is presented with the breathless excitement of an explorer cresting a new peak.

While MongoDB collections and secondary indexes are stored by the WiredTiger storage engine... the text search indexes use Lucene in a mongot process...

A bold architectural choice! One that neatly sidesteps pesky little formalities like, oh, Atomicity. I’m certain the synchronization between these two disparate systems is managed with the utmost rigor, and not, as I suspect, with the distributed systems equivalent of wishful thinking and a cron job. They’ve certainly made their choice on the CAP theorem triangle, haven’t they? Consistency is but a suggestion, it seems. One shudders to think what a transaction across both would even look like. It probably involves a "promise" of some kind. How quaint.

The genuine excitement at using a graphical user interface to "delve into the specifics" is palpable. It speaks to a certain pioneering spirit. Why trouble oneself with reading boring old specifications or formal models when you can simply "inspect" the binary artifacts with a "Toolbox"? Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on query processing; they'd rather poke the digital entrails to see how they squirm. The author’s satisfaction upon confirming that a search for "🍎" and "🍏" performs as expected is truly heartwarming. It’s the simple things, isn't it?

And then, the pièce de résistance:

While the scores may feel intuitively correct when you look at the data, it's important to remember there's no magic — everything is based on well‑known mathematics and formulas.

Bless their hearts. They’ve discovered Information Retrieval. It’s wonderful to see them embrace these "well-known mathematics," even if they're bolted onto a system that treats the relational model like a historical curiosity. I suppose it’s too much to ask that they read Salton or Robertson's original papers on the topic, but we must celebrate progress where we find it.

All in all, this is a laudable effort. It shows a real can-do spirit and a willingness to get one’s hands dirty. Keep tinkering, by all means. It’s a wonderful way to learn. Perhaps one day, after enough time spent reverse-engineering these ad-hoc contraptions, the appeal of a system designed with forethought and theoretical soundness might become apparent. One can always hope.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my copy of A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks is getting cold.