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I have a theory that every programmer, at an early stage in their career, comes up with something approximating the 'metadatabase'. The only difference between

I have a theory that every programmer, at an early stage in their career, comes up with something approximating the 'metadatabase'. The only difference between any of us is how quickly we realise it's an appalling idea. There's a grey area: I've worked with databases on internal systems with key/value tables that just about make sense and were small enough to be manageable. It's when you see this kind of crap in production, third-party products that you want to run a mile.

MattBearman 10y ago
Ha, I did it in my early PHP days! At one stage I even tried using MySQL column comments to store metadata. I think these kinds of things are great learning experiences, I'm just glad that abomination of mine was never released.
arethuza 10y ago
A lot of "enterprise" applications (particularly CRMs) do have everything in the database - including their own metadata and executable code (scripts and/or binaries). Sometimes this works a lot better that you might expect and the platform works pretty well, sometimes it produces Cthulhu level nightmares.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Magento is a pretty good example, as I describe here (and oh my goodness the horrors in DCoder's followup comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874
chriswarbo 10y ago
Sounds like the "inner-platform effect", which this article's title seems to be a reference to. That's where a system is so soft-coded that its configuration ends up being a (poor) clone of the original programming language. That could be using a key/value table in a relational database, and using custom data and code to reimplement tables/columns/joins/etc. In the case of JDSL, it's using Javascript code and JSON metadata to implement Javascript code. There's also the "second system effect", where the creator tries to avoid all of the bad things they encountered in the first system, and implement every spur-of-the-moment idea they ever had, all at once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >which this article's title seems to be a reference to The first mention of JDSL is a link to an article about it: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect
morgante 10y ago
It's extraordinary how often I have to point out that what someone is proposing is either called a "database" (to people who think it's a good idea to build a complicated file system complete with various metadata files) or a "programming language" (to the people who think it would be helpful to have some language which can logically encode business rules in a computationally understandable manner).
- kbenson 10y ago
  The interesting thing is that it goes both ways. Sometimes, when someone wants to store blobs of data in the database, you need to explain to them that it's probably better to use the file system in some manner. The common refrain is "no, we want to use the database", to which the answer often is "the file system is a database, just one that's already been optimized for what you are trying to do". Similarly, sometimes it's useful to provide just enough primitives that a "non-programmer" can be trained on how to perform a very constrained set of operations on the data they deal with, and provide them with a simplistic language that funnels them into the types of operations they are most likely to want and away from (or disallowing) operations that are deemed problematic or complex. The issue is that these options are usually not what you want to do. Not because they are wrong, but because they are much more likely to result in something worse, given the possible outcomes. Usually, the result is multiple of the following: too late, too slow, too complex, too inefficient, too hard to maintain, too hard to develop. That said, given a fairly lax timetable, smart people to design and develop the system with, and a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, great things can be accomplished. But how often to do we get all that at once?

MattBearman 10y ago

Ha, I did it in my early PHP days! At one stage I even tried using MySQL column comments to store metadata. I think these kinds of things are great learning experiences, I'm just glad that abomination of mine was never released.

arethuza 10y ago

A lot of "enterprise" applications (particularly CRMs) do have everything in the database - including their own metadata and executable code (scripts and/or binaries). Sometimes this works a lot better that you might expect and the platform works pretty well, sometimes it produces Cthulhu level nightmares.

davidgerard 10y ago
Magento is a pretty good example, as I describe here (and oh my goodness the horrors in DCoder's followup comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152874

chriswarbo 10y ago

Sounds like the "inner-platform effect", which this article's title seems to be a reference to. That's where a system is so soft-coded that its configuration ends up being a (poor) clone of the original programming language. That could be using a key/value table in a relational database, and using custom data and code to reimplement tables/columns/joins/etc. In the case of JDSL, it's using Javascript code and JSON metadata to implement Javascript code. There's also the "second system effect", where the creator tries to avoid all of the bad things they encountered in the first system, and implement every spur-of-the-moment idea they ever had, all at once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Kristine1975 10y ago
>which this article's title seems to be a reference to The first mention of JDSL is a link to an article about it: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect

morgante 10y ago

It's extraordinary how often I have to point out that what someone is proposing is either called a "database" (to people who think it's a good idea to build a complicated file system complete with various metadata files) or a "programming language" (to the people who think it would be helpful to have some language which can logically encode business rules in a computationally understandable manner).

kbenson 10y ago
The interesting thing is that it goes both ways. Sometimes, when someone wants to store blobs of data in the database, you need to explain to them that it's probably better to use the file system in some manner. The common refrain is "no, we want to use the database", to which the answer often is "the file system is a database, just one that's already been optimized for what you are trying to do". Similarly, sometimes it's useful to provide just enough primitives that a "non-programmer" can be trained on how to perform a very constrained set of operations on the data they deal with, and provide them with a simplistic language that funnels them into the types of operations they are most likely to want and away from (or disallowing) operations that are deemed problematic or complex. The issue is that these options are usually not what you want to do. Not because they are wrong, but because they are much more likely to result in something worse, given the possible outcomes. Usually, the result is multiple of the following: too late, too slow, too complex, too inefficient, too hard to maintain, too hard to develop. That said, given a fairly lax timetable, smart people to design and develop the system with, and a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, great things can be accomplished. But how often to do we get all that at once?