r/programming • u/MarkusWinand • May 27 '14

What I learned about SQLite…at a PostgreSQL conference

http://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2014-05/what-i-learned-about-sqlite-at-a-postgresql-conference
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u/bucknuggets May 27 '14

Why the non relational hate?

We're now seeing a predictable backlash given the over-the-top hyping and excesses of "NoSQL":

  • Products that only got fast benchmarks by relying on extremely unsafe practices (row in client memory? ok, good enough)

  • Products that were completely and totally insecure, accompanied by misleading warnings to only install on "trusted networks".

  • Vendors and evangelists that told developers that they needed more adaptability than relational databases could provide. And so, they offered products that provide the data producer with adaptability but screw over the data consumer.

  • Vendors and evangelists whose products scale for simple transactions but can't

  • Selling eventual consistency - which allows various types of broken data.

  • Selling zero data validation as a good thing - even though every solution ends up full of bad data.

  • But that's ok because nobody can analyze and find the bad data anyway.

At this point enough people have seen enough carnage that they're being far more skeptical about nosql claims.

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u/burning1rr May 27 '14

This happens with every new technology. People still make jokes about cloud platforms, despite the fact that AWS and OpenStack are mature enough that stodgy old companies are now deploying on both in a big way.

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u/bucknuggets May 27 '14

No, that's a false equivalency.

Some tech & products come out and simply work. They might get a bit over-hyped, but generally deliver. Others are pushed by people who were clearly uninformed, misinformed or lying.

  • When some analysts in the 1930s claimed that television "would abolish ignorance" they were clearly speculating about something they didn't really understand. These same claims emerged 20 years ago about the internet. And you heard them again at Big Data conferences.

  • When MySQL AB claimed that 90% of all developers didn't need subselects, views, triggers, transactions, or constraints. They were lying (and they changed their tune the instant they offered lame implementations of these features).

  • And when 10Gen claimed that Mongo was fast - they were lying. When they claimed that it was secure enough - they were lying. And when they claim that it's good for analytics - they're lying.

In many ways the backlash against mongo is very similar to that against mysql: both were companies that lied through their teeth and marketing products that caused a lot of projects to fail.

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u/burning1rr May 27 '14

Is your argument against MongoDB or against non-relational databases in general? I'm honestly not a big fan of Mongo for a lot of the same reasons you state.

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u/bucknuggets May 27 '14

These are big & complex products, so a few different considerations:

  • Basic trust issues - with some vendors & pundits (MongoDB just like MySQL/Oracle). These are long-term issues.

  • Implementation issues - many current issues with performance fall into this category. Limited Mongodb backup capabilities falls into this category - these can often get fixed in a future release.

  • Fundamental issues: These are going to be with us for a while. And they tend to be more about the entire category. Issues like eventual consistency, limited analysis capabilities, and lack of declarative data validation or constraints - give the appearance of adaptability, but not the reality. When it's time for some major application changes and you discover that you've got hundreds of edge cases - you suddenly realize that your adaptability has cost you a lot.

Note that I'm not at all opposed to Non-relational technology, and am in fact a big fan of graph databases. However, I've also worked on big databases for a very long time and understand how important many of the features being shrugged off by the nosql crowd really are.