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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

> As a relational database user we are used to treat the database as stupid and mainly use it to save and retrieve data. ArangoDB lets you extend the database using Javascript (production ready) and Mruby (experimental).

?!? A common complaint against relational database people are having "too much" logic in the database. (I clearly don't agree, using store procedures and custom extensions ;P.)

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Personally I loathe stored procedures because often they include a lot of logic that shouldn't be on the database and they also generally involve SQL extenstions that are pretty terrible for the general-purpose computing you see them used for.

But if that layer is primarily used for providing, controlling, and optimizing access to the data I can see the appeal. And in that case? Being able to write the procedural parts in a language that's less-terrible than typical SQL extensions would be really nice.

"Being able to write the procedural parts in a language that's less-terrible than typical SQL extensions would be really nice."

Postgres allows writing functions in many languages, including C, python, and javascript.

Exactly, the problem with stored procedures isn't that they exist but that once a programmer is working in a given environment he won't change to another one until forced, with the result that once someone starts writing stored procedures they tend not to stop until the app is in the database. If there were a clear mechanism to stop app data from going in the SPs they'd have a much better reputation.

Yet, if you have to rollout a database server and an application server, it can be quite some overhead for certain kind of applications. I think this data-layer on top of the data store is especially interesting for e.g. backends in a network world, where your data is distributed, or e.g. when you need to aggregate data from multiple sources.

Or, what use case is your comment about?

IMHO nowadays quite a lot of logic is moved into the front-end (for example "single web application"). In these cases you only need to provide some API in the back-end. But normally you need a bit more then "just" the data:

- some access control (e. g. sessions) - compute some fields (e. g. "age" derived from "birthday") - combine and filter data before transfering it the client (e. g. for graph traversals)

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