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An application could easily create their own Tree<K,V> with serde or binencode or something else. A key/value database doesn't really want to know about an app

An application could easily create their own Tree<K,V> with serde or binencode or something else. A key/value database doesn't really want to know about an application's types, because that complicates storage algorithms because sorting is now much more complex. In the same way, asm doesn't really have data types. All you have are bytes and addresses. A database needs to be able to use the encoding that it's given, rather than create another type system underneath it.

Ericson2314 7y ago
> A key/value database doesn't really want to know about an application's type Relational DBs have for decades. > Because that complicates storage algorithms because sorting is now much more complex Leveraging the types to build better indices is huge. Different data admits different total orders / partial order / lattices / other mathematical structure. If you generalize the math to infinitely large tables, this is not the difference between certain queries existing or not existing, it is the deference between queries existing or not existing. One might say limit of algorithmic complexity is realizability https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/realizability https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/realizability.