Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. A delightful little dispatch from the digital coal mines. One simply must applaud the sheer ingenuity on display here. To think, for decades, we in the Ivory Tower have insisted that students understand the fundamentals of query construction and relational algebra. How foolish we've been! It seems the solution was never to write a proper, non-correlated subquery—perhaps using a JOIN or a CTE, as a first-year student might—but to simply find the right magical incantation in the "advanced configuration" menu.
It's a rather quaint notion, this idea of fixing a poorly constructed question by adjusting the room's acoustics instead of rephrasing the question itself. It has a certain... artisanal charm. The authors celebrate that one can achieve performance "without requiring you to modify a single line of SQL code." And why would you want to? Writing clear, efficient, and logical SQL is such a dreadful chore. It's far better to treat the database as an inscrutable black box and beseech the cloud provider's proprietary daemons to kindly make your N+1 query problem disappear.
This is, of course, a bold new paradigm. Codd gave us twelve rules for relational purity, a framework for a system whose behavior is predictable and grounded in first-order logic. This... this is more like architectural alchemy. Don't understand the load-bearing principles? No problem! Just sprinkle some "advanced optimization" dust on it and hope the entire structure doesn't collapse. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on query optimizers; the goal was to create a system smart enough to handle well-formed declarative instructions, not to build a patient so sick it needs a room full of life-support machines just to breathe.
One is reminded of the industry's general philosophy, which seems to be a willful ignorance of anything published before last Tuesday's keynote. They chant "ACID properties" like a mantra, yet seem horrified by the notion that the Consistency of a system's performance might actually be related to the consistency of the queries you feed it. They talk about the CAP theorem as if it's a menu from which you can pick two, but they fail to grasp that the real trade-offs are often made between "rigorous understanding" and "shipping it by Friday."
This approach is a masterclass in treating the symptom. Why bother with:
...when you can just flip a switch? It's a testament to modern engineering.
...transform these performance challenges into efficient operations without requiring you to modify a single line of SQL code.
Truly magnificent. An intellectual absolution for the sin of writing a bad query in the first place. Who needs to learn when you can configure? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This is the generation that thinks "database theory" is a series of Medium articles on why MongoDB is "web scale." It’s all so tiresome.
I must thank the authors for this brief, if terrifying, glimpse into the modern state of database "expertise." It has been profoundly illuminating. Rest assured, it is with the most sincere and cheerful disposition that I promise to never read this blog again. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a first-edition copy of A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks that needs dusting. At least that makes sense.