Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I love databases

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: Why I love databases

#51

Post by ddorian43 »

marknadal wrote: post #32

I'm glad he loves databases, databases have been the bane of my existence. However, the torment they have given me has also lead to a similar fascination - and now I'm writing my own database! So I've become very familiar with the topics he writes on, and they are very good points for anybody interested in the subject. Why would I write my own database? Because databases are hard, and I am determined to make them eas…

A database...... in javascript... The only thing next(probably already done) is a mailserver.

Re: Why I love databases

#52

Post by cfolgar »

Since we're discussing databases...is there any "golden standard" learning resource/introduction to PostegreSQL? As a college student, I do not have much experience with them yet but I am aware of how important it would be to be comfortable with them in your day to development. Something tells me that my usual approach of diving in and tinkering by building out an idea wouldn't serve me as well for db's; it just seems to me that there's some fundamental database concepts that I would be missing if I went down that path.

Any advice as to where to start a structured approach to learning about databases would be highly appreciated :)

Re: Why I love databases

#53

Post by sklogic »

ams6110 wrote: post #42
sklogic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time a plain text file is good enough. Databases are overrated.

This is simply not true, otherwise we would all be using text files. Text files can work in some situations. I disagree that this is "most of the time."

We are using text files. How many programs in a typical Unix installation need to communicate to a database? Next to none. How many are communicating via text files? Almost all of them.

Re: Why I love databases

#54

Post by threeseed »

gfodor wrote: post #50
threeseed wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't listen to anyone who blindly suggests one direction. Would you listen to someone who said "use C++ for everything" ? No. Because it's dumb advice. Use the right tool for the right job. If you're an application developer you need to invest the time to try some of these databases. In every startup and enterprise I've worked at in the last 10 years it has been application developers who chose the database. You can…

Its pretty funny how right above this comment in the thread suggests the exact opposite. I think "use the right tool for the job" is a notoriously misleading phrase. What does "right" mean, and what is "the job?" If you are at the point where certain databases simply won't work , then of course there's a way to measure this, but most of us are not in this situation. There is operational and mental overhead for each d…

I just don't think you understand the expression. "Right tool for the right job" means from the perspective of the person choosing the tool. There is no "right" answer. And saying "use PostgreSQL for everything" is no different to saying "use C++ for everything". It's dumb and sloppy.

Choosing a database is an important decision. Just like choosing an application stack. People should be encouraged to spike different approaches before going down a path that we both agree will be difficult to unwind from.

And I agree that tables/events are somewhat fundamental. But they aren't exclusive to RDBMS systems. I have built CQRS systems using Cassandra many times before.

Re: Why I love databases

#55

Post by ams6110 »

Roboprog wrote: post #49

I have lived a very sheltered existence. I have never worked on an application which had a database cluster or sharding, rather than just running on a single server. Of course, the servers are a little bigger now than they were back around say 1990.

These things are necessasry only at internet scale. Your typical business application does not need a sharded distributed database even in a large enterprise system.

Re: Why I love databases

#56

Post by wowmsi »

cfolgar wrote: post #52

Since we're discussing databases...is there any "golden standard" learning resource/introduction to PostegreSQL? As a college student, I do not have much experience with them yet but I am aware of how important it would be to be comfortable with them in your day to development. Something tells me that my usual approach of diving in and tinkering by building out an idea wouldn't serve me as well for db's; it just seem…

I would recommend "Architecture of a Database System" by Joe Hellerstein, Micheal Stonebraker, and James Hamilton [0] as a start if you want formal perspective without getting too much into theory.

[0] http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf

Re: Why I love databases

#57

Post by jeeyoungk »

Thank you everybody for your valuable comment. Like I've said in the post, this was my first attempt to explain my passion. I read every one of your comments, and spent the next few days fully understanding their implications.

This post is a bit biased towards what I've interacted with. I think I do have a good sample of various workflow, but there are obviously large number of databases and use cases that I'm missing, and my view of what is "modern" may not incorporate a lot of bleeding edge theory and technologies.

Operational complexity is definitely my #1 concern. The service I originally maintained is a OLTP system, located at the top of the service & data dependency graph. Availability is the top concern.

The current system I'm writing is metrics database. The operational burden is much lighter. It is almost a leaf node in the service & data dependency graph, and I can take downtime to restart the cluster. A very different workflow, indeed.

Thanks!

Re: Why I love databases

#58

Post by duaneb »

sklogic wrote: post #53
ams6110 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply not true, otherwise we would all be using text files. Text files can work in some situations. I disagree that this is "most of the time."

We are using text files. How many programs in a typical Unix installation need to communicate to a database? Next to none. How many are communicating via text files? Almost all of them.

The file system is just a shitty db. Why does it matter whether it writes to a file system or to sqlite3?

Re: Why I love databases

#59

Post by takeda »

daigoba66 wrote: post #27
justinsb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is to use PostgreSQL, unless you have a good reason not to. There are definitely cases where PostgreSQL is not the optimal choice, but if you don't know why you're not a good match for Postgres, you're probably not in that group.

Postgres, and MSSQL if you can afford it, are the Swiss Army Knives of database systems. And I mean that in a good way.

For a second I thought you said MySQL and was a bit puzzled.

I know indirectly that MSSQL is quite good database, but since you are putting Open Source and proprietary database next to each other it makes me wonder why you picked MSSQL and for example skipped its competitor such as Oracle.

This is an honest question, I know very little about MSSQL or Oracle so I'm curious why you picked this one. I know that at least 10 years ago MSSQL and Oracle were close competitors, did Oracle lose their race?

Re: Why I love databases

#60

Post by sampo »

quonn wrote: post #3

"The study of databases intersects almost every topic in computer science" - I've heard this before, especially for Compilers. But it has been false for a long time, CS is far more diverse now. For example, how do Databases intersect AI/Machine Learning/Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Numerics/Simulation, Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture or Cryptography?

> how do Databases intersect ... Bioinformatics

You must be kidding. The whole field of bioinformatics was born when the biologists started to have large enough collections of protein and DNA sequences that working with them by hand was not practical anymore.

Post reply on HN