Re: Rationale for aversion to the central database?

On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 4:39 PM, Guyren Howe <guyren@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am a Rails developer at a medium-large size company. I’ve mostly worked at
> smaller companies. I’ve some exposure to other web development communities.
>
> When it comes to databases, I have universally encountered the attitude that
> one should treat the database as a dumb data bucket. There is a *very*
> strong aversion to putting much of any business logic in the database. I
> encounter substantial aversion to have multiple applications access one
> database, or even the reverse: all abstraction should be at the application
> layer.
>
> My best theory is that these communities developed at a time when Windows
> was more dominant, and just generally it was *significantly* easier to use
> MySQL than Postgres for many, particularly new, developers. And it is pretty
> reasonable to adopt an aversion to sophisticated use of the database in that
> case.
>
> This attitude has just continued to today, even as many of them have
> switched to Postgres.
>
> This is only a hypothesis. I am now officially researching the issue. I
> would be grateful for any wisdom from this community.
>
>
> Aside: it is rare to find a situation in life or anywhere where one widely
> adopted thing is worse in *every way* than another thing, but this certainly
> was and largely still continues to be the case when one compares MySQL and
> Postgres. So why do folks continue to use MySQL? I find this mystifying.

This is a very common attitude in the industry, and a very unfortunate
one.  It's particularly common the so called 'enterprise' stacks --
java, .net etc.   It's also completely crazy.   SQL isn't _that_
difficult to learn, and in the particular case of postgres, allow for
faster implementation for solutions for many clases of data driven
problems that competing platforms.  SQL is an ideal language for
business logic IMSHO -- particularly the non-procedural forms of it.
There are a number of casual factors for this attitude:

*) outsourcing companies push standard stacks
*) major software vendors (ms/ibm/etc) push 'lock-in' toolsets with
lack of standardization
*) poor understanding of data structure fundamentals is extremely pervasive
*) developer salaries for data developers skew higher (causing HR
departments to look for lower cost skillsets, totally oblivious to
total development costs)
*) 'next big thing in data' companies constantly marketing and pushing
the 'new paradidm' and against proven, low cost solutions.  Hadoop,
big data, etc etc.
*) developer multiculturalism (why do I need to know anything other than java?)
*) perceived slow performance of databases when the problem is really storage
*) poor math training disincline learning of set based logic in school
*) corporate takeover of C.S. education syllabus -- in many overseas
schools the educational programs are written by software vendors and
are essentially tool training, or worse positional education for
outsourcing grind shops

I think things are getting better.  SQL is undergoing a kind of
renaissance for various reasons, and postgresql in particular is
really on a tear.

merlin