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
550
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
1.7k
Writing a High Performance Database in Go
benbjohnson
11
6.8k
Raft: The Understandable Distributed Consensus Protocol
benbjohnson
106
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
600
Other Decks in Technology
See All in Technology
SREの次のキャリアの道しるべ 〜SREがマネジメントレイヤーに挑戦して、 気づいたこととTips〜
coconala_engineer
1
710
Delta airlines Customer®️ USA Contact Numbers: Complete 2025 Support Guide
deltahelp
0
1.1k
【あのMCPって、どんな処理してるの?】 AWS CDKでの開発で便利なAWS MCP Servers特集
yoshimi0227
6
610
「クラウドコスト絶対削減」を支える技術—FinOpsを超えた徹底的なクラウドコスト削減の実践論
delta_tech
4
180
衛星運用をソフトウェアエンジニアに依頼したときにできあがるもの
sankichi92
1
210
対話型音声AIアプリケーションの信頼性向上の取り組み
ivry_presentationmaterials
1
620
Delta airlines®️ USA Contact Numbers: Complete 2025 Support Guide
airtravelguide
0
350
AWS CDK 入門ガイド これだけは知っておきたいヒント集
anank
4
500
CDKTFについてざっくり理解する!!~CloudFormationからCDKTFへ変換するツールも作ってみた~
masakiokuda
1
190
第64回コンピュータビジョン勉強会「The PanAf-FGBG Dataset: Understanding the Impact of Backgrounds in Wildlife Behaviour Recognition」
x_ttyszk
0
140
PO初心者が考えた ”POらしさ”
nb_rady
0
230
全部AI、全員Cursor、ドキュメント駆動開発 〜DevinやGeminiも添えて〜
rinchsan
2
640
Featured
See All Featured
Imperfection Machines: The Place of Print at Facebook
scottboms
267
13k
4 Signs Your Business is Dying
shpigford
184
22k
GraphQLとの向き合い方2022年版
quramy
49
14k
The Pragmatic Product Professional
lauravandoore
35
6.7k
Rebuilding a faster, lazier Slack
samanthasiow
83
9.1k
Fight the Zombie Pattern Library - RWD Summit 2016
marcelosomers
233
17k
jQuery: Nuts, Bolts and Bling
dougneiner
63
7.8k
Dealing with People You Can't Stand - Big Design 2015
cassininazir
367
26k
The Art of Delivering Value - GDevCon NA Keynote
reverentgeek
15
1.6k
VelocityConf: Rendering Performance Case Studies
addyosmani
332
24k
Visualization
eitanlees
146
16k
Measuring & Analyzing Core Web Vitals
bluesmoon
7
510
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