Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simon_ORourke | Hacker News Reader

I've no doubt this is true, however, anyone I've ever met who exclaimed "let's create our own database" would be viewed as dangerous, unprofessional or downright uneducated in any business meeting. There's just too much can go badly wrong, for all the sunk cost in getting anything up and running.

View on HN

That is such a problem in today's world. Of course you don't want to re-invent the wheel and all that, but we must be open to the idea of having to do it. Innovation stagnates if people suggesting redoing something are immediately seen as "dangerous, unprofessional or downright uneducated"

I think the issue is that you rarely get to see a neat new solution to a given problem. Usually you'll see some kind of half-baked attempted solution that's worse than the already existing alternatives.

Yes, but what I'm describing is the problem of not even listening to the idea of a new attempt.

The real problem is people who want to write a database never write one and have a very brief understanding of the domain and its complexities. Another problem is such database can became an engineering bottleneck. Other teams need new features easily found in a conventional db but “core team” unable to meet their demands. I’ve seen this in practice, result is a dead product.

> would be viewed as dangerous, unprofessional or downright uneducated in any business meeting

Sounds like a great place to work.

> There's just too much can go badly wrong, for all the sunk cost in getting anything up and running.

Engineering is the art of compromise. In many cases the compromises would not be worth it, but that doesn't mean there are zero places where it would be, and eschewing the discussion out fear of how it would be perceived is the opposite of Engineering.

Depends on their meaning of a "database"

True, if it's some limited in-memory key-value store then that's a lot more readily implemented than something resembling Oracle's latest enterprise offering, and potentially could fall under the umbrella of it being a "database".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com