> It’s not a myth. It depends really. My approach for the last 20+ years is first build a proper database and data model and go from there. It's akin to only w

> It’s not a myth. It depends really. My approach for the last 20+ years is first build a proper database and data model and go from there. It's akin to only when you know the rules, should you break the rules. In the late 90s the db I was using didn't have 'materialized views' so we built a system that ran nightly and generated them for highly used sets of data (effectively removing joins b/c they hadn't scaled). Some systems had a nice 3rd normal tx database for the main program, but was dumped into a star/snowflake schema for reporting. Others worked fine coming right out the tx system. As computers have gotten faster, I find the original database can often go much farther. But, when it finally breaks down we now have so many more tools to help handle the situation. Admittedly, I've never dealt with data at FB or Google scale, but honestly that's a completely different set of constraints than what most of the world deals with.