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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

> What are schemas even for? They just make things hard to change for no reason.

This attitude right here is why the RDBMS old guard despises NoSQL. Willful ignorance should not be celebrated.

I was floored by this quote. As technical founder, one of my chief priorities operationally is ensuring that a) our systems are up and b) our data is consistent. I've dabbled in NoSQL (a la friendfeed) a bit and my head exploded when I wanted to migrate meta-schemas on multiple machines (potentially writing to the same data) with minimal concurrent alternate code paths. I need to be able to speak with 100% confidence that every object in our database is consistent and valid and without a schema on a database level this is really hard to enforce because anyone (including a bug) could accidentally throw a borked bag of properties into a key value store.

A lot of the excitement over schema-less data stores (I think) really comes down to instant DDL changes, which is why you should really just use Postgres instead of MySQL.

"If you don't like it, it must be because you haven't taken the time to understand it" is cognitive poison. What evidence will convince you that someone has understood well enough to judge that something doesn't make sense?

I've spent many years using schemas, and I know well how they work and what they achieve. I'm saying they're a lousy tradeoff.

You may well understand what they are and have a well thought out nuanced opinion, but the quote shows none of that. It sounds like an out of hand dismissal of the whole concept of schema which would be pretty ignorant.

*edit I misspelled ignorant... irony alert

The quoted statement was hyperbole. I followed it with as much nuance as I felt it made sense to get into in the broader context of the article.

I'm attacking what you actually said in the article. You're attacking what your own statement of what you think I believe.

Engineering choices are always tradeoffs. If they're founded on ignorance, they're bad choices--always. Your article is trying too hard to be cute and funny and comes across as ignorant. I assert that promoting uninformed decision-making is both intellectually dishonest and constitutes a much truer form of "cognitive poisoning."

There's quite a big difference between "no reason" and "lousy tradeoff."

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