Re:Repeating Yourself Thrice Doesn’t Turn You into a 3x Deve...
by bob1029 on Sunday July 30, 2023 @04:37PM
(#36935690)
I find similar arguments around SQL.
So much time & frustration expended simply to avoid typing out the magic database commands... And the constant ego trips attempting to outperform 30+ year old query planner codebases on 7-way+ joins by using baby's first ORM.
We are in the era of hyperscale SQL engines. Database engines that are spread out across multiple servers, racks and buildings. Engines so vast & complex the compute & storage responsibilities have to be separated into different stacks. But, they (the good ones) still work just like the old school approach from an application perspective. The workload necessary to actually saturate one of these databases would be incredible. I some days wonder if Twitter could be rewritten on top of one without much suffering.
And, if you aren't trying to go big and bold or spend a bunch of money, there's always SQLite. It also supports basically all the same damn things. It can run entirely in memory. It has FTS indexing. Your CTE-enabled queries will work just fine on it. If you find SQLite doesn't scale with you, swapping to a different engine really isn't that big of a deal either. You will have some dialect conflicts but it's generally very workable, especially if you use some thin layer like Dapper between your code and the actual connection instances.
So much time & frustration expended simply to avoid typing out the magic database commands... And the constant ego trips attempting to outperform 30+ year old query planner codebases on 7-way+ joins by using baby's first ORM.
> the tar pit
If you find yourself stuck in one of these, I strongly recommend giving this a shot: https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf
"but it won't scale"
We are in the era of hyperscale SQL engines. Database engines that are spread out across multiple servers, racks and buildings. Engines so vast & complex the compute & storage responsibilities have to be separated into different stacks. But, they (the good ones) still work just like the old school approach from an application perspective. The workload necessary to actually saturate one of these databases would be incredible. I some days wonder if Twitter could be rewritten on top of one without much suffering.
And, if you aren't trying to go big and bold or spend a bunch of money, there's always SQLite. It also supports basically all the same damn things. It can run entirely in memory. It has FTS indexing. Your CTE-enabled queries will work just fine on it. If you find SQLite doesn't scale with you, swapping to a different engine really isn't that big of a deal either. You will have some dialect conflicts but it's generally very workable, especially if you use some thin layer like Dapper between your code and the actual connection instances.