Re:SQL is 43 years old – Here’s why we still use it today
by acdha on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @10:19AM
(#14246518)
The two factors I saw:
1. Bad experiences with cumbersome ORMs and refusal to learn how databases work: basically fighting with performance or normalization problems and concluding the problem was the concept rather than using it poorly (“JOINs/subselects are hard so I'm doing 10k queries. SQL isn't web scale!”). A related component of this was optimizing for only part of the problem – e.g. someone's writing a web form and they found it appealing to slap arbitrary key:value pairs into a NoSQL store because they hadn't gotten around to writing the validation, reporting, etc. code which actually needed structure.
2. Hype, hype, hype: people would look at papers coming out of large places like Google, Yahoo, etc. with impressive numbers and think they needed the same infrastructure to impress the other cool kids, ignoring the fact that those papers mentioned traffic / data volumes many orders of magnitude higher and the huge companies could hire more engineers to make up for the extra time needed to hit that kind of scale. A lot of that thought was influenced by the pre-SSD era so the assumptions about when you exceed the limits of a single server really don't hold up to serious consideration now, or often even back then.
1. Bad experiences with cumbersome ORMs and refusal to learn how databases work: basically fighting with performance or normalization problems and concluding the problem was the concept rather than using it poorly (“JOINs/subselects are hard so I'm doing 10k queries. SQL isn't web scale!”). A related component of this was optimizing for only part of the problem – e.g. someone's writing a web form and they found it appealing to slap arbitrary key:value pairs into a NoSQL store because they hadn't gotten around to writing the validation, reporting, etc. code which actually needed structure.
2. Hype, hype, hype: people would look at papers coming out of large places like Google, Yahoo, etc. with impressive numbers and think they needed the same infrastructure to impress the other cool kids, ignoring the fact that those papers mentioned traffic / data volumes many orders of magnitude higher and the huge companies could hire more engineers to make up for the extra time needed to hit that kind of scale. A lot of that thought was influenced by the pre-SSD era so the assumptions about when you exceed the limits of a single server really don't hold up to serious consideration now, or often even back then.