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> New features require building a routing map for all possible URLs on boot, which is a dramatically heavy operation. We were eventually forced to forgo our traditional ORM layer entirely to get any degree of performance (insert: shock/awe) - Related: It turns out SQLite3 has a query limit of 999 SQL variables, so we had to implement a recursive query strategy for SQLite only. Wild.

Out of pure technical curiosity, how did this come to be the chosen approach? A query with 999 variables strikes me as a serious code smell, but at the same time I don't doubt you guys seriously considered the alternatives before choosing this route.

We're loading all public-facing resources - so posts, tags, authors and importantly the relations between them - in as few queries as possible, using fairly typical where...in queries in order to build the relations. SQLite uses variables for in queries, and so sites with a lot of content triggered the "more than 999 variables" error.

Solvable, of course, but quite an interesting limitation to discover!

Oracle had this limitation, too, or at least it did a few years ago.

I discovered a similar limit with postgresql, mainly due to the protocol sending the query length as a 16-bit number, limiting the total length to ~65k characters. In that case it was far better to create a temporary table and JOIN that rather than using an " IN (..)" clause anyway, so that's another option if SQLite supports it.

There's no 16bit number limiting query length in PG, the limit is 1GB and has been for a LONG time. But it's indeed often a good idea to use a temp table for some of such cases.

This sounds like an interesting usecase for a graph database, is that something you have considered?

It's an interesting idea but Ghost is a primarily self-hosted application with a non-technical user base. The freedom to swap out or add core dependencies like database servers isn't really available in that environment.

I haven't check the code, but as few queries as possible is not always the best approach. I bet you guys spent a lot of time on the problem, but still very curious how you landed with this decision.

For the relation data, you should check out Hexastore [0] (essentially graph storage). It takes up much more space, but you can follow any paths of relationship and you can do it step by step instead of loading everything at once.

[0] http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/1/1453965.pdf

Hey John -- I recall seeing on your Mastodon account recently that you were interested in supporting ActivityPub for Ghost blogs. Any news on that front?

Yeah! Very interested - we have a highly voted topic for it over on the forum with some ideas, too. It's not a primary focus of the core team right now, but it's the sort of thing we'd be very interested in open source contributions for.

One of the main motivations for people using Medium is the network effect. I think it would be really cool if that could be recreated in a platform-agnostic, decentralised way :)

I'm not sure how you could improve on blogrolls here, but I'm curious to see what you try.

I host several self-hosted blogs using Ghost 1.0 in Docker. When can we expect 2.0 released via Docker please?

The first place to look is the Ghost Docker repository and there’s already an open issue for it:

https://github.com/docker-library/ghost/issues/142

Question: Has the (Electron) Ghost app been updated to work with Ghost 2.0 as well? i.e., am I going to break things if I update my server to Ghost 2.0 then try to publish new posts using the app?

Ghost Desktop has been updated to support the Koeing Editor (see https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-Desktop/releases/tag/v1.7....) - Just make sure you're on 1.7.0 ;)

Hell yeah, John. I've absolutely loved watching you and your team grow over the years. Congrats and best of luck moving forward :) New stuff looks excellent.

"Also: Let me be the first to say that I can’t believe there’s still no Postgres support, which is absolutely outrageous."

Postgres is open source.

Why do they owe you?

If it matters, write the code.

That's not how he meant it, because it makes no sense.

He meant that he still hasn't taken the time to get some people in his team to support Postgres officially, I guess.

It's a joke, the context of which is that they removed Postgres support from Ghost a while ago, and people keep complaining about it.

See: https://blog.ghost.org/dropping-support-for-postgresql/

I have to give him credit, I was here to complain about it.