Hacker News Reader

It's not a bad thing on SSD storage maybe. On spinning platter hard drives, we may have to suffer a head seek time to get each field of the object from a separate record in the separate table. Whereas the fields of a record can be stored close together.

View on HN

“Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation)… Activities of users at terminals and most application programs should remain unaffected when the internal representation of data is changed and even when some aspects of the external representation are changed…”

Roll the related data up into materialized views for read performance.

Yes, BUT. For analytical workloads you often want the locality to be within columns, and not within rows, we call these things column stores ;).

Database design has many tradeoffs, and there is no free lunch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com