Shoving triples into SQL is braindead, but theres a multi-billion dollar industry around triple stores, graph databases, and RDF.
Datomic is in the same group, and I'd consider Rich Hickey to be one of the best programmers there are.
Datomic is in the same group, and I'd consider Rich Hickey to be one of the best programmers there are.
However, Derek was no Rich Hickey. Such deviations from the norm should be left to the type of person that can create Clojure, and very far away from the people that upload PII to GitHub. If we could create a culture where we slapped people's hands on instinct when they reached for MongoDB, I think we'd be better off.
The PII thing is on an entirely different page, and indeed sweat inducing :D
That's calibrated too far the other way but there'd be less damage.
Notice how in the example you have:
1 Name Ludic
1 Age 29
1 Profession Tortured Soul
I think that doesn't happen in keyword-value stores. Your key 1 has to be unique: it retrieves one blob, and that's it. You have to stuff all the properties into that blob somehow: for instance, by treating it as an array of the keys of other blobs.
Derek could have used multiple tables. That still gives you all the flexibility. Just that if someone wants to invent a new property, they have to add a table.
Then we have
Name table: Age table: Profession table:
1 Ludic 1 29 1 Tortured Soul
Database design has many tradeoffs, and there is no free lunch.
Roll the related data up into materialized views for read performance.
It absolutely does happen in triple stores, though, where data is commonly stored in subject-predicate-object form, and the subject's identifier is certainly meant to be unique to that subject, but not per triple.
> 1 Name Ludic
> 1 Age 29
> 1 Profession Tortured Soul
> The key is not unique. There is no primary key. So to hunt down all the properties of User 1, you have to do a query for all the records whose Key is 1.
In this example, the primary key would be ([User ID],[Key]). The primary key does not need to be a single field.
IMO the real tragedy is that Datomic predated the open-source-but-you-can't-host-it-or-otherwise-operate-it-for-profit licenses that have proliferated recently.
If I ever get the time, I'll write a compiler. And if I have time left over on sabbatical, I'll reimplement Datomic as a Postgres extension (goddamnit).