61–70 of 588 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such an horrendous practice, I am yet to find a database were this makes sense. Maybe my brain is not wired for it
The problem is maybe not so much the splitting and putting extra columns in a separate table. It's that you even have a table that large that it necessitates such a thing. Worst case you have a main table and a detail table that has a one to one correlation to the main entity table.
I had one customer who came back with the same request, slightly differently worded, every single month, and every single month I'd say the same thing. They had this site they were running that was essentially a Yellow Pages type site. They had a large set of companies with contact details, each with multiple business categories associated with it. You'd choose a category, and they'd return a list of matching companies.
The problem was the site was really slow. I took a quick look around, and saw that all the time was lost querying the database. Taking a quick look at the schema I discovered that their approach to categorisation was to have a TEXT column, with semicolon separated 4 character strings in it. Each 4 character string mapped to a business category.
So when someone wanted to load up, say, all pest control companies, it would check the category mapping table, get the 4 character string, and then go to the companies table and do:
SELECT * FROM companies WHERE categories LIKE "%PEST%"
I guess that's probably okay for the developer without real world scale data, and real world traffic counts to worry about. But they had lots of data in the database, and that category field could have dozens of categories against a company. As soon as they had more than about 4-5 simultaneous customers performance started tanking.
I could never get them to accept that they needed to rethink the database schema. One month they were bleating about how is it possible that Google can manage to do such a search across a much larger amount of data, much faster. They really didn't like my answer that amounted to "By having a sane database schema". All they were willing to do was pay over the odds for our most powerful server at the time, which had enough capacity to hold the entire database in memory.
He acts like sequence key is odd, but that’s quite normal in database world. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createsequence.h...
I think the intriguing part was purposefully using the same sequence value for rows in multiple tables. I've worked with globally unique (to our application) integer keys, and per table integer sequences (which obviously aren't globally unique), but I don't recall seeing anyone use a global sequence but purposefully reuse elements of the sequence before.
> I miss that direct connection. The fast feedback. The lack of making grand plans. There's no date on this article, but it feels "prior to the MongoDB-is-webscale memes" and thus slightly outdated? But, hey, I get where they're coming from. Personally, I used to be very much schema-first, make sure the data makes sense before even thinking about coding. Carefully deciding whether to use an INT data type where a BYTE…
> went by the name Munch How do you pronounce that? Was it like the word munch in “munching on some snacks”? Or like the name of the painter Edward Munch? https://www.nrk.no/kultur/nrk-endrer-munch-uttale-1.539667 (note: this link is in Norwegian)
As in munching on snacks
My favorite factoid for others was that when I was there, we used split-horizon DNS to squat on an in-use domain name for tons of internal services, including Github. I kept wondering what would happen if the owner realized & set up his own services to catch people who weren't on the VPN.
Back about 15 years ago, I worked for a web hosting company that provided some sysadmin consultation services. Customer paid us, and I would take a look. I had one customer who came back with the same request, slightly differently worded, every single month, and every single month I'd say the same thing. They had this site they were running that was essentially a Yellow Pages type site. They had a large set of compan…
I stumbled across that comment a few years back and it changed the way I handle tags and categories so just sharing it here. If anyone has an equivalent for Sqlite, I’d love to hear it!
My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…
So they had a problem, got 2 years of approved development effort of a small team to solve it property which they did successfully, and then you resigned? After they fixed the problem? Of course where they started was just awful but a place that recognized it's problems, commits to fixing it, and has sufficient competency to actually fix it sounds rather nice to me. Many orgs get stuck at step 1. I presume there were…
After everything was finished up, I was feeling burnt out and realised that I'd held on for too long at a company with a fundamentally bad culture that wasn't going to change just because the tech did, so I moved on.
My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…
I recall something similar from my first job, except the shared file locking was a full on feature in Macromedia dreamweaver. CSS was just starting to get adopted and every project we worked on just had one “gobal.css” file. When someone else had global.css locked, you’d call dibs if you needed it next. Inevitably, everyday someone would leave the office and forget to unlock global.css and no one else could get anyth…
My worst codebase story: In my first real job, I worked for a company that maintained a large legacy product programmed in a combination of COBOL and Java. In order to work on the Java side of the product, you checked out individual files from source control to work on, which 'locked' the files and prevented other developers from checking out the same files. This functionality was not part of our actual source contro…
Visual SourceSafe would show that a file was checked out hinting to maybe stay away. Good times.
He acts like sequence key is odd, but that’s quite normal in database world. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createsequence.h...
Yes, but both these have very different properties. He said (I don't know if its the case) that the db didnt have an autoincremental type. Postgres uses these sequence objects to implement autoincremental ids as he was referring to, they are implemented in-engine and are very fast and have already solved data races. In the article, what he complains about is not about what a sequence is, but about implementing it man…
Really hope they had a “get key” stored procedure to handle that.