Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalyons | Hacker News Reader

Why would you make it a shared resource if you don’t have to?

Decades of experience have shown us the massive costs of doing so - the crippled velocity and soul crushing agony of dba change control teams, the overhead salary of database priests, the arcane performance nightmares, the nuclear blast radius, the fundamental organizational counter-incentives of a shared resource .

Why on earth would we choose to pay those terrible prices in this day and age, when infrastructure is code, managed databases are everywhere and every team can have their own thing. You didn’t have a choice previously, now you do.

View on HN

You wouldn’t but in any decent sized organization you will have to. If it is an organization that needs to exist there will be some common set of critical data.

In my experience, isolated (repeated) data storage paradigm is even more common at large organizations. They share data via services, ETLs, event buses, etc.

That’s just not true though, I’ve worked at decent sized companies without shared RDBMs, so you don’t have to.

You DO have to share data in other ways, usually datawarehouse or services, but that is not the same thing.

To me this is semantics. So it’s a data warehouse rather than a database. Ok. Or we share data from a common source via “services” - ok but that’s another word for a database and a client (using http to do the talking doesn’t really change anything).

I’m not saying literally every source of data has to be shared and centrally managed. I’m also not saying “rdbms accessed via traditional client and queried via sql” when I say database. I’m just saying a shared database of some shape is inevitable.

Ok, but the OP and the article are talking specifically about a directly shared rdbms scenario, not some nebulous concept of shared data.

Also, operationally it’s not “semantics” at all. You don’t get into (many) operational problems with analysts sharing a datawarehouse. You absolutely do with online apps sharing a rdbms, they aren’t the same thing.

No, neither the article nor the post I originally replied to specify anything more specific than “database”. Database != RDBMS.

A data warehouse is a type of database and is does need to be managed. Your assertion that it is easier to manage is orthogonal to my assertion that there will always be a central database to manage in an organization of decent size.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com