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Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

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Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#31

Post by lijok »

SpacetimeDB looks great for game dev. I've been hearing chitter chatter in the FaaS world about connecting clients directly to the DB as a means of reducing number of components and complexity in simple-ish CRUD apps. Not sure how well that design holds up there, time will tell.

For those seeing this (SpacetimeDB) and immediatelly conjuring images of nightmares to be, consider the following: if you had an extremely latency sensitive usecase and had the opportunity to host your database and business logic on the same machine, why wouldn't you?

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#32

Post by hot_gril »

fifilura wrote: post #4

My colleagues hate me, but I also found that SQL is The way to write business logic. Lots of caveats about difficulty to test and weird syntax. But it is just that SQL is the most terse and standard way so express logic. And that in itself is the most important factor to avoid bugs. Not what testing strategy you choose.

Same, every backend service I write now has the majority of the business logic in SQL and a little pre/post-processing in regular code. A well-designed schema will mean that your queries don't get messy. If some more complex thing starts feeling forced, I add a bit more non-SQL code to make it reasonable.

When teammates look at my code, and logic is all right there instead of scattered around, and there's a schema file backing it all that makes it clear what all the relations are, they have an easy time making tweaks or adding on. Yes it's very testable too.

This also kinda depends on having a multi-service architecture if your system is large. Separate database for each. That's a good thing anyway.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#33

Post by c048 »

hyperpape wrote: post #29
jerf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At the same time, the level of hype about ECS today reminds me an awful lot of the amount of hype surrounding OOP in the 90s." I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though. OOP was claimed as not a specific useful tool, but the answer to all programming, a billing it has not lived up to. It achieved "useful tool", no question, especially as some of the very rough bits were sanded…

> I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though. I recently watched the first 30 minutes of Mike Acton's 2014 talk, and while that portion of the talk wasn't about ECS specifically, it very much presented an absolutist perspective.

This is a issue with how most potential solutions or languages are marketed, even to experienced developers. They're all sold as silver bullets and every experienced programmer should know that there is no such thing.

A lot of it also stems from what I call 'the hello world problem'. Very simple cases are brought up to sell you on the idea, but it's only in complex scenarios that you really learn the worth of something.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#34

Post by hot_gril »

randomdata wrote: post #6
fifilura wrote: post #4

My colleagues hate me, but I also found that SQL is The way to write business logic. Lots of caveats about difficulty to test and weird syntax. But it is just that SQL is the most terse and standard way so express logic. And that in itself is the most important factor to avoid bugs. Not what testing strategy you choose.

> And that in itself is the most important factor to avoid bugs. I'm not sure about that. SQL was the first language I learned and the language that has always been there throughout the decades, and is also where I make the most mistakes.

If you were to write the equivalent of a SQL query in some other language, you'll probably make a lot more mistakes. Especially if you're trying to achieve the same performance. And I mean a read-only query, not even something with multi-writes and locking.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#35

Post by vagrantJin »

cloutiertyler wrote: post #7
jitl wrote: post #2

If the site designers are on here by chance, take a look on iPhone. The blog post is quite squished there, pretty much unreadable. EDIT: nevermind, fixed after a refresh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ still maybe worth a look

I am on here. Will definitely take a look!

another thing. firefox issue.

firefox on android no longer supports mobile view?

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#36

Post by hot_gril »

jerf wrote: post #26
munificent wrote: post #23

As an ex-game developer and software architecture nerd, I'm very excited about data-oriented design and ECS. It really is a cool pattern, and it's a very common one in shipping games today. It's not just architecture astronaut stuff. At the same time, the level of hype about ECS today reminds me an awful lot of the amount of hype surrounding OOP in the 90s. Can ECS be a better way to structure your game entities and…

"At the same time, the level of hype about ECS today reminds me an awful lot of the amount of hype surrounding OOP in the 90s." I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though. OOP was claimed as not a specific useful tool, but the answer to all programming, a billing it has not lived up to. It achieved "useful tool", no question, especially as some of the very rough bits were sanded…

OOP even got mixed with databases to form nasty hype around ORMs and NoSQL.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#37

Post by marshray »

cloutiertyler wrote: post #7
jitl wrote: post #2

If the site designers are on here by chance, take a look on iPhone. The blog post is quite squished there, pretty much unreadable. EDIT: nevermind, fixed after a refresh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ still maybe worth a look

I am on here. Will definitely take a look!

While you're here... where's the scrollbar?

I'm on desktop (Edge) and don't see a scrollbar.

Very distracting.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#38

Post by inopinatus »

Author feedback: the large print, and the static elements (screen-thieving banner + “AI assistant” button), made attempting to read this blog as presented a vile experience on my phone. The AI button can’t be dismissed, if you ask it how to dismiss itself it doesn't know, and it won’t even accept negative feedback due to obscured submit buttons.

Fortunately there’s Reader mode.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#40

Post by chrsig »

crazygringo wrote: post #15
fifilura wrote: post #4

My colleagues hate me, but I also found that SQL is The way to write business logic. Lots of caveats about difficulty to test and weird syntax. But it is just that SQL is the most terse and standard way so express logic. And that in itself is the most important factor to avoid bugs. Not what testing strategy you choose.

> But it is just that SQL is the most terse and standard way so express logic. As someone who has written a ton of complex SQL... I couldn't disagree more. Trying to shoehorn things that can trivially and intuitively be expressed in a couple of for-loops with a couple of variables, into SQL expressions making use of joins and aggregate functions and GROUP BY's and (god forbid) correlated subqueries... having to repli…

The types of issues you're enumerating are really part of a learning curve that every language and environment will have.

> not having basic functions for calculating percentiles or even a basic median

I don't think this is really true anymore; windowing functions are pretty prolific, and I think every major database will have some percentile functions

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