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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

#151

Post by LarsDu88 »

I think I'm still a bit on the fence after reading this post on whether building out relational queries on top of ECS will ultimately nuke the cache locality and multithreading performance benefits of ECS in the long run.

The great promise of ECS is that once we all have 128-512 core CPUs, that we will actually be making great use of them in the videogames of the future rather than throwing away the vast majority of performance which is the current world with the vast majority of Unity and Unreal games.

Once you hit the real world and start making queries of everything, everywhere, all at once, maybe it'll be lock, lock, lock on your "database queries"

And also, it seem like this DB really demands a game engine like Bevy actually get finished!

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#152

Post by fuy »

crazygringo wrote: post #50
chrsig wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not though. That's why excellent coders often despise having to learn and use SQL, and basically just refuse to. SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology. This is basically a strawman + appeal to authority argument. I've no desire to bicker. "Uniquely terrible" is quite subjective, we'll have to agree to disagree on if it appli…

Excuse me, but I'm certainly not "bickering" and I resent the insinuation. And you don't seem to understand what a strawman argument is. I'm not going to write an article on this for you, but you can certainly see the sentiment frequently expressed on HN that the rise of NoSQL and of ORM's is a direct result of otherwise capable programmers not wanting to deal with SQL and its conceptual building blocks such as joins…

The common sentiment on HN I'd say is the opposite: ORM's are needed for junior devs who didn't have time to learn SQL properly. After NoSQL hype died out (around 5 years ago), the HN attitude towards both ORM's and using NoSQL instead of relational dbs has been mostly negative for sure.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#153

Post by fooododododo »

ttfkam wrote: post #144
fooododododo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking triggers etc is pretty straightforward, just put them in a repo and apply them as part of a schema change. Testing them can be tricky, as unit tests aren't as likely to capture the locks/time that can be an issue when the database is under load. Tools like pgreplay can be helpful here.

It's not like tracking events in application logic is somehow just a bucket of unicorn farts and rainbows. At least triggers are deterministic and tracked within transactions. Can't tell you how often folks update the DB with an ORM in application logic but forget to update dependent records in other tables in their one-off branch of logic. Sometimes it's a hard problem. That said, I think triggers need very well-mai…

Agree re trigger maintenance

Re orm, I'm strongly biased towards only using them when they (1) are absolutely necessary or provide some extreme benefit (2) are able to output the raw SQL to be executed on the db (3) the SQL to be executed is understood.

I've seen them used as a substitute for understanding SQL/databases and, personally, think that's a pretty bad idea.

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#154

Post by fifilura »

ttfkam wrote: post #149
ndriscoll wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they just used the wrong word. I'd agree with them, but clarify that SQL is not just terse, but concise. A join or a group by is going to be much clearer than writing the code the query plan is going to generate, creating temporary hash maps, doing nested loops, etc.

Yep, because unlike general purpose programming languages, you describe WHAT data you want from SQL, not HOW to get that data as in most application languages.

Exactly. And yes, maybe concise was the word I meant to use (not native English speaker).

Re: Databases are the endgame for data-oriented design

#157

Post by rendall »

cloutiertyler wrote: post #106
rendall wrote: post #96

Hi spacetimedb.com. You apparently want people to read about your product, but have a non-GDPR-compliant popup that requires people to uncheck multiple "vendors" if your readers do not want to be tracked. Edit: it actually does not allow any unchecking. Just "you agree to these marketing and tracking cookies by using this site" Nope. Baffling. It does not lend confidence in your core product. If you're not respectful…

Will fix!

7 days later, it's still there, unchanged.
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