etcd

It’s about the time for year-end performance reviews. While I’m always afraid I’ll narrowly avoid being fired for gross incompetence, that’s not usually how it goes. But that meeting did remind me about a bit of restructuring I plan to impose for 2017 that should vastly improve database availability across our organization. Many of the techniques to accomplish that—while Postgres tools in our case—are not Postgres-specific concepts. Much of database fabric design comes down to compromise.

The pure, unadulterated, presumptuous impudence of NoSQL. Engines like MongoDB recklessly discard concepts like ACID in some futile quest to achieve “web scale”, and end up accomplishing neither. RDBMS systems have literally decades of history to draw upon, and have long since conquered the pitfalls NoSQL platforms are just now encountering. There may be something to a couple of them, but by and large, they’re nothing we really need. At least, that’s something I might have said a couple of weeks ago.