Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another dispatch from the digital trenches. One finds it quaint, almost charming, that the "practitioners" of today feel the need to document their rediscovery of fire. Reading this piece on InnoDB's write-ahead logging, I was struck by a profound sense of academic melancholy. It seems the industry has produced a generation of engineers who treat the fundamental, settled principles of database systems as some esoteric, arcane magic they've just uncovered. One pictures them gathered around a server rack, chanting incantations to the Cloud Native gods, hoping for a consistent state.
Let us, for the sake of what little educational rigor remains in this world, examine the state of affairs through a proper lens.
First, we have the breathless pronouncements about ensuring data is "safe, consistent, and crash-recoverable." My dear boy, you've just clumsily described the bare-minimum requirements for a transactional system, principles Haerder and Reuter elegantly defined as ACID nearly four decades ago. To present this as a complex, noteworthy sequence is akin to a toddler proudly explaining how he's managed to put one block on top of another. It's a foundational expectation, not a revolutionary feature. One shudders to think what they consider an advanced topic. Probably how to spell 'normalization'.
This, of course, is a symptom of a larger disease: the willful abandonment of the relational model. In their frantic chase for "web scale," they've thrown out Codd’s twelve sacred rules—particularly Rule 3, the systematic treatment of nulls, which they now celebrate as “schemaless flexibility.” They trade the mathematical purity of relational algebra for unwieldy JSON blobs and then spend years reinventing the JOIN with ten times the latency and a mountain of client-side code. It's an intellectual regression of staggering proportions.
And how do they solve the problems they've created? By chanting their new mantra: "Eventual Consistency." What an absolutely glorious euphemism for "your data might be correct at some point in the future, but we make no promises as to when, or if." Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on distributed systems, or they'd understand that the CAP theorem is not a menu from which one can simply discard 'Consistency' because it's inconvenient. It is a formal trade-off, not an excuse for shoddy engineering.
They treat the ‘C’ in CAP as if it were merely a suggestion, like the speed limit on a deserted highway.
Then there is the cargo-culting around so-called "innovations" like serverless databases. They speak of it as if they've transcended the physical realm itself. In reality, they've just outsourced the headache of managing state to a vendor who is, I assure you, still using servers. They’ve simply wrapped antediluvian principles in a new layer of abstraction and marketing jargon, convincing themselves they've achieved something novel when they’ve only managed to obscure the fundamentals further.
The most tragic part is the sheer lack of intellectual curiosity. This blog post, with its diagrams made with [crayon-...], perfectly encapsulates the modern approach. There is no mention of formal models, no discussion of concurrency control theory, no hint that these problems were rigorously analyzed and largely solved by minds far greater than ours before the author was even born. They're just tinkering, "looking under the hood" without ever bothering to learn the physics that makes the engine run.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a graduate seminar to prepare on the elegance of third normal form. Some of us still prefer formal proofs to blog posts.