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Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

luu.io

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Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#11

Post by marc_abonce »

> The company is still standing and seems to be doing well financially, so I guess things turned out well enough, or maybe some of the technical decisions started trending more reasonable.

Perhaps I've been lucky or I haven't been observant enough, but I've never seen a company suffer financially because of inefficient code. Don't get me wrong, I still value good code for its own sake, but in my experience there is no correlation between that and profits.

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#12

Post by nemothekid »

cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #6

Does the author really call joins "joints"? I thought it was maybe a spelling thing but then they make a Snoop joke...

The author was implying that in between writing the business logic, they were smoking a lot of weed.

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#13

Post by spockz »

marc_abonce wrote: post #11

> The company is still standing and seems to be doing well financially, so I guess things turned out well enough, or maybe some of the technical decisions started trending more reasonable. Perhaps I've been lucky or I haven't been observant enough, but I've never seen a company suffer financially because of inefficient code. Don't get me wrong, I still value good code for its own sake, but in my experience there is n…

IME, the suffering of bad performing code is mostly secondary. It increases compute costs. Mostly because requiring more beefy VMs than strictly required which is still benign and possibly more cost-efficient than spending more engineering effort. Sometimes because of the lack of performance now more scaling and orchestration is required which comes additional complexity and therefore compute and staffing cost. This is rare to get noticed and fixed due to organisational momentum.

The worst is when the performance is so bad it starts to prevent onboarding new features or customers.

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#14

Post by wongarsu »

marc_abonce wrote: post #11

> The company is still standing and seems to be doing well financially, so I guess things turned out well enough, or maybe some of the technical decisions started trending more reasonable. Perhaps I've been lucky or I haven't been observant enough, but I've never seen a company suffer financially because of inefficient code. Don't get me wrong, I still value good code for its own sake, but in my experience there is n…

I bet Atlassian could make even more money with Jira if it wasn't this slow. They are not struggling as it is, but it's bad enough that it is costing them customers

But generally I would agree

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#15

Post by sumanthvepa »

spockz wrote: post #13
marc_abonce wrote: post #11

> The company is still standing and seems to be doing well financially, so I guess things turned out well enough, or maybe some of the technical decisions started trending more reasonable. Perhaps I've been lucky or I haven't been observant enough, but I've never seen a company suffer financially because of inefficient code. Don't get me wrong, I still value good code for its own sake, but in my experience there is n…

IME, the suffering of bad performing code is mostly secondary. It increases compute costs. Mostly because requiring more beefy VMs than strictly required which is still benign and possibly more cost-efficient than spending more engineering effort. Sometimes because of the lack of performance now more scaling and orchestration is required which comes additional complexity and therefore compute and staffing cost. This…

The real cost is an opportunity cost. It doesn't show up in the financials. Your ability to react quickly to new business opportunities is hurt. Most CEOs and boards don't notice it, until it's too late.

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#16

Post by gfody »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #10

Religion and engineering do not make good bedfellows. I got into a pointless argument with someone on LinkedIn who was trashing on ORMs, strawmanning them by stating they would all pull the entire data into memory to just perform a count (some ORMs are much more sophisticated than this). It was some sort of weird religious argument because the chap thought every single piece of data processing should be written in a…

ORMs are basically the enemy of rdbms, by encouraging antipatterns and undermining language features they have easily done more harm than good. of course reasonable people can be trusted to use them reasonably but if you're arguing about it on the internet..

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#18

Post by scuff3d »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #10

Religion and engineering do not make good bedfellows. I got into a pointless argument with someone on LinkedIn who was trashing on ORMs, strawmanning them by stating they would all pull the entire data into memory to just perform a count (some ORMs are much more sophisticated than this). It was some sort of weird religious argument because the chap thought every single piece of data processing should be written in a…

I work for a company that's still obsessed with micro services. "Religious" is a pretty good way to describe it. Drives me absolutely nuts, especially when no one seems to understand what micro services are. I've seen at least half a dozen teams that have just created a distributed monolith and called it a micro service because they're using Docker and Kubernetes.

Re: Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

#19

Post by _ea1k »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #10

Religion and engineering do not make good bedfellows. I got into a pointless argument with someone on LinkedIn who was trashing on ORMs, strawmanning them by stating they would all pull the entire data into memory to just perform a count (some ORMs are much more sophisticated than this). It was some sort of weird religious argument because the chap thought every single piece of data processing should be written in a…

Yeah, I've had almost the same experience with people and ORMs. Often they'll make a good point about some weakness of some specific ORM, but it is almost always some use case that represents 1% (or less) of their application. Worse, there's nothing stopping them from just using sql for those couple of times that they need to bypass the ORM. After all, there's no reason to be religious about it and only use one tool.
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