Gotta agree with others and say that they’re clearly skimming over the facts that: - they didn’t have the expertise to actually fix the SQL. That query smells

Gotta agree with others and say that they’re clearly skimming over the facts that: - they didn’t have the expertise to actually fix the SQL. That query smells bad. The data model smells bad. For some reason HN is always superstitiously afraid of letting developers touch the database, but if you don’t let devs touch the database enough you end up with this sort of thing; or that crap data model with properties in rows instead of columns, because oh god, we can’t let devs actually do DDL so we’d better make it all really flexible (and incredibly slow because it’s a misuse of the database). I mean, implementing your own result caching mechanism? I don’t know about MySQL but surely it has its own caching mechanism (Oracle does) that isn’t being used because the query is bad. - project management probably had no interest in fixing the performance/incorrect data problems, and devs were expected to do it in their own time. In a way though this makes me feel better, other people are dealing with these problems too and their overengineered solutions work and keep the company running, I guess mine will too :)