Transactions Aren't Everything

michaelnygard.com

35 points·zdw··7 comments

Should be titled, "consider the cost of compliance tooling when picking a DB". Strange article, I'm not sure what the point is.

Lunch isn't everything. Even though many people eat lunch, lunch isn't the only thing you should consider when eating. For instance, there is also dinner, and dinner has a different set of characteristics than lunch. When deciding what to eat today, remember to consider both lunch and dinner. There may be other considerations as well, such as breakfast, that are not discussed here.

I personally like Pat Helland's paper, "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An apostate’s opinion", which goes into "practical approaches used in the implementations of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world which rejects distributed transactions."

2007 Biennial Conference on Innovative DataSystems Research (CIDR) version (pdf) https://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs223/papers/cidr07p15.pdf

2016 version from ACM Queue https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3012426.3025012

Look, in 2023 the choice is actually really easy. Just pick Postgres (managed/unmanaged), and move when you find a solid reason too.

Indeed. You don't need a documentdb. Your schema-less store actually contains a whole set of objects that have the same schema.

And you'll want to normalize that data. So do that.

Graphs? Please, spend 2 weeks looking at why you feel a behemoth like Neo4j is actually necessary in your system. Because it probably isn't. Please don't confuse ease of navigation with the need for a graph database.

Not sure if I missed done nuanced point here or it was just a non-sequitur of an article

yes?

yeah, that was really brief. I was actually hoping for someone to bring up https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01930 (keeping CALM) for an interesting alternative

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