Rails and I have a contorted history. I first engaged when I was looking around for schema based code generation tools, and Rails had Scaffolds. Turned out that DHH didn't like Scaffolds, and they kind of disappeared from the Rails landscape, late 1.x time frame.
I've peeked in every now and again since, so today I wandered over here via the Postgres site. I don't yet know whether Mr. Copeland is a database guy at heart, or yet another coder pretending to be one. OTOH, these are his notes from a talk given by two others, who, if the notes are to be believed, haven't drunk the Koder Kool Aid (it really was Flavor Aid, for those who get it). Of particular piquancy:
9:00 One query, 12 joins - complicated, but query time goes from 8 seconds to 60 ms.
20:00 Use constraints, FKs, etc to preserve data integrity - "anything you don't have a constraint on will get corrupted"
42:00 Do analytics in the database. Saw speed improve from 90s to 5s and saved tons of RAM.
1:01:40 Tune PostgreSQL - shared_buffers, work_mem, autovacuum, etc. Rely on community knowledge for initial configuration.
The "Use constraints" one is really, really important. The notion that only the application code should edit input is the wedge issue. Iff the code will only, forever, be the sole user of the data (and you *know* that's baloney) should the application code do it all. And, in that case (presumably because "performance" can only be attained by ignoring RDBMS' services) suck up your cujones and write bespoke file I/O like a real COBOL coder. The RDBMS, modulo vanilla MySql, is going to provide the services anyway. Otherwise, never trust ANY client input. In most cases, never trust ANY client read request (bare sql). The purpose of the client code is to display (perhaps to another program or file, not just a screen) data and pass back data. That's it.
Which brings me to the analytics note. PG is a little short on analytical functions; DB2/Oracle/SqlServer all support SQL-99/03 functions and add more, but use what's there. The same can be said for ETL, too; in most cases sql will get the job done. What the ETL crowd don't get is that the database is closed over its datatypes. There are some syntactic issues going from vendor A to vendor B databases, but the engines are quite capable of transforming from one consistent state to another all on their lonesomes.
One of the knobs I miss from DB2 is the ability to assign bufferpools (DB2's term) at the tablespace level. PG now has tablespaces, but so far as I can see, buffering is at the engine/instance level. Someday.
IFF AI, as currently implemented, can intuit Special Relativity from just a clock tower and a moving tram will I take AI seriously.
Infinite granularity yields infinite complexity.
The Kleptocracy of Muskistan Devours You
The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974
[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]
Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't
believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders. -- Dr. McElhone/1974
[T]he massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.
-- Curt Devine/2024 [that's the point: make the Damn Gummint incompetent, then destroy it because it's incompetent]
-- Drew Weissman/2022
To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have
seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past
performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business
logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]
I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector,
what is dimensionality reduction.
-- Christopher Wylie/2018
... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having
a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.
-- Linus Torvalds/2007
-- Chris Date/2009
This Week's thought
[Scotland's HPV] vaccination program began in 2008, and so far the women who were vaccinated as 12- or 13-year-olds have shown not one single case of cervical cancer. And the rate in women who were vaccinated at later ages was 80% lower than the unvaccinated. Cervical cancer is almost completely preventable through such vaccination programs, and the anti-vaccine activists who have come out against them (such as the dangerous fool nominated to be secretary of HHS) can go to hell. -- Derek Lowe/2024 [the morons will be running the asylum, if we let them]
See you next week in a brand new show©Heckle and Jeckle
In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to
build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.
About
- Robert Young
- Been doing databases, both relational and others, as well as operations research since Hector was a Pup.
Shameless Plug
I know a little something about SQL, DB2 (preferably LUW, z/OS if the money's right), Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, and database design in general. Mentoring/teaching/consulting on a short term basis, too. And a bit of stat analysis if it's R.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
gnuoytr at rcn dot com.
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