Comment by EdHominem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EdHominem | Hacker News Reader

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I hear this data-integrity thing a lot but I don't run into these problems myself. I think it might be a functional-programming thing. It's much easier and safer to declare your constraints rather than trying to enforce them. If you aren't in a functional language I can see why you'd want to reach out to one but SQL in a separate process is just one of the options.

> Things such as joins, transactions, and means of enforcing data integrity are useful

If the domain needs transactions I'm already speccing them regardless of general usefulness. Yes all that stuff is useful, but all abstractions have a cost which isn't free just because it's hidden in the DB.

For a problem that didn't need transactions, but for which they were useful, why would you automatically want to couple the solution with your storage layer? If you're looking for the ability to express business logic clearly without cluttering it with error handling, for instance, software transaction memory would probably be a better level to work at.

> If the domain needs transactions [...]

Considering we speak about daemon software (services exposing some API to readers and writers) that provides CRUD behavior to the user (end-user or other developer), isn't that nearly always the case to guarantee write access to concurrent writers without the risk of crippling your data?

Furthermore I am not sure how this relates to FP.

> It's much easier and safer to declare your constraints rather than trying to enforce them.

But that is a strong point of RDBMs implementing SQL. You have some kind of schema (think type) and use selected functions (select, update, delete, create, etc.) to transform the data.

> > It's much easier and safer to declare your constraints rather than trying to enforce them.

> Furthermore I am not sure how this relates to FP.

I'm saying that FP is great for ensuring correctness.

> But that is a strong point of RDBMs implementing SQL.

Right. And if I didn't have other functional languages available that might be a bigger issue.

STM is awesome but a single node solution. Distributed transactions are a hard problem.

I understand, but you can't just throw a DB at it and walk away. For instance, which DB? Setup how? Running on what type of hosts? What topological requirements does this have? How much does of a multiplier does it place on your data load.

I'd definitely use a trusted DB for storing bank accounts. The consistency is pretty much the first requirement and the data maps perfectly to tables. And 7B checking accounts isn't that big, compared to some problems so it'd probably scale pretty well even worst-case.

But I probably wouldn't for an MMO. Or at least, it wouldn't be where I stored every little thing going on around them - just the events (xp and gold earned) that they'd freak out about if we lost. But even just a log-structured DB would work well for that.

If there's no contention for a resource (in the bank case - the value in the account) there's much less reason for a transaction. I want the system to make its best effort but I don't want to wait around for the message if there isn't anything I can do on a failure anyways.

Are there domains that don't need transactions?

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