Web 2.0 and the relational database

Yes, this is yet another rant about how people incorrectly dismiss state-of-art databases. (Famous people have done it, why shouldn’t I?) It’s amazing how much the Web 2.0 crowd abhors relational databases. Some people have declared real SQL-based databases dead, while some have proclaimed them to be as not cool any more. Amazon’s SimpleDB, Google’s BigTable and Apache’s CouchDB are trendy, bloggable ideas that to be honest, are ideal for very specific, specialized scenarios. Most of the other use cases, and that comprises 95 out of a 100 web startups can do just fine with a memcached + Postgres setup, but there seems to be a constant attitude of “nooooo if we don’t write our code like google they will never buy us…!” that just doesn’t seem to go away, spreading like a malignant cancer throughout the web development community. The constant argument is “scaling to thousands of machines”, and “machines are cheap”. What about the argument “I just spent an entire day implementing the equivalent of a join and group by using my glorified key-value-pair library”? And what about the mantra “smaller code that does more”?

Jon Holland (who shares his name with the father of genetic algorithms) performs a simple analysis which points out a probable cause: People are just too stupid to properly use declarative query languages, and hence would rather roll their own reinvention of the data management wheel, congratulating themselves on having solved the “scaling” problem because their code is ten times simpler. It’s also a hundred times less useful, but that fact is quickly shoved under the rug.

It’s not that all Web-related / Open Source code is terrible. If you look at Drupal code, you’ll notice the amount of sane coding that goes on inside the system. JOINs used where needed, caching / throttling assumed as part of core, and the schema allows for flexibility to do fun stuff. (Not to say I don’t have a bone to pick with Drupal core devs; the whole “views” and “workflow” ideas are soon going to snowball into the reinvention of Postgres’s ADTs; all written in PHP running on top of a database layer abstracted Postgres setup.)

If Drupal can do this, why can’t everyone else? Dear Web 2.0, I have a humble request. Pick up the Cow book if you have access to a library, or attend a database course in your school. I don’t care if you use an RDBMS after that, but at least you’ll reinvent the whole thing in a proper way.