Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
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Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#2Call me old, title theme for me deeply resonates with foundations chapters of loosing important knowledge.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#3I would think that having bad internals would create a bad dev experience.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#4Friendly reminder that this post is published on the PlanetScale blog, a company that sells a database SaaS. Beware of the bias.
I personally would argue with every single point this article makes, except scalability.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#5> MySQL, MongoDB, Firebase, Spanner; there has literally never been a better time to be a database user at any level of complexity or scale. But there’s still one common thread (ha!) among them – the focus is on infrastructure, not developer experience.
It was my impression that everyone picked (and still picks) MySQL, MongoDB, and Firebase _because_ they were the easiest to use. It seemed like developer experience was by far the most important thing to them (compared to sane behavior initially in the case of Mongo and MySQL, some of which has since evolved).
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#6> NoSQL databases are maturing, for sure – we’re starting to see support for transactions (on some timeframe of consistency) and generally more stability. After years of working with “flexible” databases though, it has become clearer that rigidity up front (defining a schema) can end up meaning flexibility later on.
So funny to me that NoSQL boosters have only recently understood that designing sane schemas and knowing what order your data is inserted is important for data integrity. It's like an entire generation of highly paid software devs never learned fundamental computer science principles.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#7Call me old, title theme for me deeply resonates with foundations chapters of loosing important knowledge.
nothing to do with age. this is published by "PlanetScale is a MySQL compatible, serverless database platform powered by Vitess." -- they have vested interest in promoting the complexities of DBs.
In my view the author has absolutely zero basis to make such a claim.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#8> NoSQL databases are maturing, for sure – we’re starting to see support for transactions (on some timeframe of consistency) and generally more stability. After years of working with “flexible” databases though, it has become clearer that rigidity up front (defining a schema) can end up meaning flexibility later on. So funny to me that NoSQL boosters have only recently understood that designing sane schemas and knowi…
That's exactly what it is. "Self-taught coder" really isn't the right word for what many are, as it implies some form of intentional individual study. More like "self learned to duck tape shit together thanks to Stack Overflow" but we don't have a catchy term for that.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#9> MySQL, MongoDB, Firebase, Spanner; there has literally never been a better time to be a database user at any level of complexity or scale. But there’s still one common thread (ha!) among them – the focus is on infrastructure, not developer experience. It was my impression that everyone picked (and still picks) MySQL, MongoDB, and Firebase _because_ they were the easiest to use. It seemed like developer experience w…
> It was my impression that everyone picked (and still picks) MySQL, MongoDB, and Firebase _because_ they were the easiest to use.
I've found that to be the case, except for enterprise development, which has different concerns than how quickly code gets written to use a database.
Re: Database internals are becoming less important than developer experience
#10> NoSQL databases are maturing, for sure – we’re starting to see support for transactions (on some timeframe of consistency) and generally more stability. After years of working with “flexible” databases though, it has become clearer that rigidity up front (defining a schema) can end up meaning flexibility later on. So funny to me that NoSQL boosters have only recently understood that designing sane schemas and knowi…
To be fair, relational algebra is hard.
That being said: going back to 1970 to read the original "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" by Codd (the paper which started the relational-database + normalization model) is incredibly useful.
But yeah, all of this debate about "how data should be modeled" was the same in 1970 as it is today.
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SQL doesn't quite fit 100% into the relational model, but its certainly inspired by Codd's relational model and designed to work with the principles from that paper.
And strangely enough, legions of authors and teachers and courses do a worse job at explaining relational databases than Codd's original 11 page paper.