Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Why You Shouldn't Write a Database
Search
benbjohnson
October 22, 2015
Technology
2
560
Why You Shouldn't Write a Database
Talk given at the October 2015 Denver Go meetup.
benbjohnson
October 22, 2015
Tweet
Share
More Decks by benbjohnson
See All by benbjohnson
Static Code Analysis Using SSA
benbjohnson
6
1.8k
Writing a High Performance Database in Go
benbjohnson
11
6.8k
Raft: The Understandable Distributed Consensus Protocol
benbjohnson
105
28k
Behavioral Analytics - Understanding the "why" and "how" of your users.
benbjohnson
9
2k
New Tech - Sky
benbjohnson
2
380
Behavioral Databases
benbjohnson
16
2.5k
Sky Analytics Pitch Deck
benbjohnson
0
610
Other Decks in Technology
See All in Technology
Wasmの気になる最新情報
askua
0
170
「改善」ってこれでいいんだっけ?
ukigmo_hiro
0
380
20251007: What happens when multi-agent systems become larger? (CyberAgent, Inc)
ornew
1
500
ソフトウェアエンジニアの生成AI活用と、これから
lycorptech_jp
PRO
0
680
新規事業におけるGORM+SQLx併用アーキテクチャ
hacomono
PRO
0
440
データ戦略部門 紹介資料
sansan33
PRO
1
3.8k
AI Agent Dojo #2 watsonx Orchestrateフローの作成
oniak3ibm
PRO
0
140
事業開発におけるDify活用事例
kentarofujii
4
1.1k
速習AGENTS.md:5分で精度を上げる "3ブロック" テンプレ
ismk
6
1.9k
現場データから見える、開発生産性の変化コード生成AI導入・運用のリアル〜 / Changes in Development Productivity and Operational Challenges Following the Introduction of Code Generation AI
nttcom
1
400
ソースを読むプロセスの例
sat
PRO
15
9.6k
Claude Codeを駆使した初めてのiOSアプリ開発 ~ゼロから3週間でグローバルハッカソンで入賞するまで~
oikon48
10
5.2k
Featured
See All Featured
Intergalactic Javascript Robots from Outer Space
tanoku
273
27k
The Psychology of Web Performance [Beyond Tellerrand 2023]
tammyeverts
49
3.1k
Cheating the UX When There Is Nothing More to Optimize - PixelPioneers
stephaniewalter
285
14k
RailsConf & Balkan Ruby 2019: The Past, Present, and Future of Rails at GitHub
eileencodes
140
34k
Testing 201, or: Great Expectations
jmmastey
45
7.7k
BBQ
matthewcrist
89
9.8k
[RailsConf 2023] Rails as a piece of cake
palkan
57
5.9k
Balancing Empowerment & Direction
lara
5
690
GraphQLの誤解/rethinking-graphql
sonatard
73
11k
実際に使うSQLの書き方 徹底解説 / pgcon21j-tutorial
soudai
PRO
190
55k
Creating an realtime collaboration tool: Agile Flush - .NET Oxford
marcduiker
34
2.3k
VelocityConf: Rendering Performance Case Studies
addyosmani
332
24k
Transcript
Why You Shouldn’t Write a Database Ben Johnson
Let’s define “database”
low-level LevelDB, BerkeleyDB, LMDB
Direct interface to OS Files, pages, & blocks Responsible for
data integrity Typically key/value
high-level SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo, InfluxDB, etc
Builds on low-level stores Rows, tables, indexes Interfaces with end
user Relational, document, time series
Me
SkyDB ReportifyDB BoltDB InfluxDB
There are n+1 reasons not to write a database
#1. High barrier to entry
How to write a database
None
legit
sorta, but not quite
seriously?
suggests using XML
nope
Available resources?
Research papers!
Research papers! Narrowly focused (indexing, storage, locks)
Research papers! High level (little or no code)
Research papers! Assumes a Ph.D
Read source code!
Read source code! MySQL >1M SLOC
Read source code! Even small databases are 10KLOC+
There is no Writing Databases 101
#2. Debugging Sucks
Bugs are catastrophic Cause corruption, loss of data integrity
Bugs are catastrophic Users with data loss are very unhappy
Find a good hex editor
Find a good hex editor (I use Hex Fiend)
None
This is not what a database looks like
None
THIS is what a database looks like
Debugging w/o data Users usually can’t release their data
#3. Tradeoffs
Users don’t understand tradeoffs
None
Read Optimized vs Write Optimized
CPU Bound vs IO Bound
https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
Features are liabilities It’s not if you have bugs, it’s
how many
#4. Limited Community
Very few people who have written a production database
TONS of people who will tell you why your database
sucks
Databases are hard
The End
The End (Just kidding!)
Not scared off yet?
Only 2 reasons to write a database:
#1. To learn
Data Integrity Indexing Isolation levels Recovery Prefetching Parser & Lexers
Replication Snapshotting Transactions Materialized View Referential Integrity Query Compilation Query Planning Query Optimization Serializability Write Ahead Log Memory Profiling Redo/Undo Log Snapshot Isolation Recovery Two-Phase Commit Quorums
#2. Gain efficiency (For a specific use case)
The more generic your database, the fewer assumptions you can
make
Go write a database!
The End @benbjohnson
Questions? @benbjohnson