Re:We saved $50k/year with a Go microservice coded in a hack...
by hueving on Tuesday April 10, 2018 @11:31PM
(#16807820)
>It's less likely that they overengineered - we are probably just underinformed.
Based on 15 years in software companies in the valley it's much less likely that this isn't over-engineered. Nearly every decision I've seen chasing technology hype has been based on ignorance of existing solutions.
Without knowing the rest of their stack, or what their data ingestion looks like, I think your query is oversimplified. If they are doing a union, then it's likely they aren't querying one table, but they are querying multiple tables. The article mentions that individual customers had as many as 500 million rows. Likely each customer has their own set of data they also pipe into the system. Next their own custom query language may support more complex algebra than standard equality.
IMO, the article doesn't sufficiently describe the problem for us to understand why their solution works. To you and I there are 100 other solutions they could have tried that seem simpler than the one they presented.
It's less likely that they overengineered - we are probably just underinformed.