Comment by siganakis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siganakis | Hacker News Reader

Data should not be organised based around retrieval or insert / update patterns but organised according to the model that best captures the essence of what the data is. That may sound fluffy, but most of the time data captured is captured following something real happening that caused data to be generated. Your data model needs to make sense in the context of the thing that happened in the real world, not in the context of what is inserted or how it is read.

The issue being that youre methods of collection and retrieval will change over time and your data model needs to support that and still make sense for existing data.

While what you describe is certainly the ideal, and likely applicable in a variety of situations, there are a lot of real world situations where it can't cut it. Antirez says it best:

   remember all those stories about DB denormalisation, and hordes of memcached or Redis farms to cache stuff, and things like that? The reality is that fancy queries are an awesome SQL capability (so incredible that it was hard for all us to escape this warm and comfortable paradigm), but not at scale.

You'll be hard pressed to find any medium-sized project in the wild that doesn't require a layer of denormalization or caching to be reasonably responsive (I mean, some frameworks come with that built-in - their users might not even be aware this is happening). You might have some beautifully crafted model underlying that layer, but don't fool yourself into thinking that's all there is.

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