4 ms·

I marvel at 5GB/s mass-storage, but then I groan at the knowledge it will be used to run a denornalized Postgres database table containing JSON blobs for querie

I marvel at 5GB/s mass-storage, but then I groan at the knowledge it will be used to run a denornalized Postgres database table containing JSON blobs for queries that will do full tablescans because apparently dropping $Lots on a high-end storage system is preferable to learning how to do things properly.

whoomp12342 4y ago
reasoning: engineers can be lazy too
- runnerup 4y ago
  Moreso, because this solution costs $4,000 so it only needs to save one week of one persons engineering time to be a more cost effective solution than “better software engineering”. It’s laziness, but it’s cost effective laziness.
- foepys 4y ago
  The end result of this is something like Microsoft Teams where they are in the process of swapping out the entire underlying runtime because the team that wrote the application itself was so lazy (read: incompetent) that it is slow on literally every machine it runs on and this is apparently the only sane way to fix the whole mess - bar a whole rewrite of the entire application.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Is this true or confirmed somewhere official? Clearly the underlying architecture has major issues.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      According to this 2021 blog article[1], MS Teams is undergoing two simultaneous overhauls: 1. Teams will use a shared, Windows systemwide Blink-based WebView2-based host instead of using its own private Electron environment. 2. The Teams' UI is changing from Angular to ReactJS. So Teams will remain a modern-day HTA, for better or for worse, but sourcing from my own experiences working with Angular, ReactJS, and MS's WebView2 vs. Electron, I'm not convinced any of these changes will substantially benefit the end-user experience except perhaps a modest reduction in memory-usage attributed to using WebView2 instead of Electron. [1]: https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2021/08/stop-saying-microsoft-teams-is-being-rewritten-from-electron-to-react/ https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2021/08/stop-saying-microsof...
      - canucker2016 4y ago
        I assume it's a lot easier to find React developers and answers to React-related programming questions than for Angular in 2023+.
        DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        Disclaimer: I'm a former Microsoft FTE SE. Microsoft doesn't hire FTE SEs on the basis of their knowledge of a single platform or library - anyone who is good-enough overall will be able to familiarize themselves with Angular - or React - or any other framework, platform, or entire paradigm - that's how the industry works. Employing people for knowledge with a specific library or platform can, and does, make sense, but only in a situation where a company needs a consultant or contractor(s) to make changes to an existing product for a short contract and then, poof, they no-longer work at the company. While Microsoft does hire plenty of contractor staff (orange-badges, "v-dash trash", etc), only a minority of them are involved in product development, and an even tinier number of those are employed in any kind of consultancy role (which makes sense, considering that Microsoft almost entirely uses only its own platforms, frameworks and libraries for its consumer-facing products) - so the fact that Microsoft swallowed its pride and adopted Electron, Angular, React, Blink/Chromium in recent years marks a significant shift in the company's ideology (for want of a better word). No-one would have predicted this even as late as 2015.
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I'm in the automation/manufacturing industry, and while I know there are big servers running ERPs and SCMs and MES and other TLAs with poorly-optimized giant databases I don't personally touch those. But still I suspect the same truths apply whether you're talking about "big iron" computers or literal metals: when evaluating the strength of an average weldment on an ordinary conveyor or machine, we like to say "Steel is cheap, engineering is expensive." Obviously there are situations when you have to employ more rigor and do the FEA, but typically, when choosing between a just-right solution and one that's obviously strong enough, just overbuilding it is a lot more efficient in terms of value. With 21 of the pictured $150 Samsung 1TB 990 Pro SSDs and, hypothetically, $1000 for this card, you're looking at $4,150 for this storage solution. If that solves your problem and lets you apply off-the-shelf Postgres and JSON and unoptimized queries, do it! That money only buys a handful of site visits and maybe a week of engineering hours to change a system that may involve dozens of users, tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and rigid requirements from upstream and downstream...maybe you can change those eventually, and it would definitely have been cheaper if all the stakeholders had a fundamental understanding of the compute requirements of full table scans and non-native blobs and designed their business around those mathematics, but that doesn't sound likely.

whoomp12342 4y ago

reasoning: engineers can be lazy too

runnerup 4y ago
Moreso, because this solution costs $4,000 so it only needs to save one week of one persons engineering time to be a more cost effective solution than “better software engineering”. It’s laziness, but it’s cost effective laziness.
foepys 4y ago
The end result of this is something like Microsoft Teams where they are in the process of swapping out the entire underlying runtime because the team that wrote the application itself was so lazy (read: incompetent) that it is slow on literally every machine it runs on and this is apparently the only sane way to fix the whole mess - bar a whole rewrite of the entire application.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  Is this true or confirmed somewhere official? Clearly the underlying architecture has major issues.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    According to this 2021 blog article[1], MS Teams is undergoing two simultaneous overhauls: 1. Teams will use a shared, Windows systemwide Blink-based WebView2-based host instead of using its own private Electron environment. 2. The Teams' UI is changing from Angular to ReactJS. So Teams will remain a modern-day HTA, for better or for worse, but sourcing from my own experiences working with Angular, ReactJS, and MS's WebView2 vs. Electron, I'm not convinced any of these changes will substantially benefit the end-user experience except perhaps a modest reduction in memory-usage attributed to using WebView2 instead of Electron. [1]: https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2021/08/stop-saying-microsoft-teams-is-being-rewritten-from-electron-to-react/ https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2021/08/stop-saying-microsof...
    - canucker2016 4y ago
      I assume it's a lot easier to find React developers and answers to React-related programming questions than for Angular in 2023+.
      - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        Disclaimer: I'm a former Microsoft FTE SE. Microsoft doesn't hire FTE SEs on the basis of their knowledge of a single platform or library - anyone who is good-enough overall will be able to familiarize themselves with Angular - or React - or any other framework, platform, or entire paradigm - that's how the industry works. Employing people for knowledge with a specific library or platform can, and does, make sense, but only in a situation where a company needs a consultant or contractor(s) to make changes to an existing product for a short contract and then, poof, they no-longer work at the company. While Microsoft does hire plenty of contractor staff (orange-badges, "v-dash trash", etc), only a minority of them are involved in product development, and an even tinier number of those are employed in any kind of consultancy role (which makes sense, considering that Microsoft almost entirely uses only its own platforms, frameworks and libraries for its consumer-facing products) - so the fact that Microsoft swallowed its pride and adopted Electron, Angular, React, Blink/Chromium in recent years marks a significant shift in the company's ideology (for want of a better word). No-one would have predicted this even as late as 2015.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

I'm in the automation/manufacturing industry, and while I know there are big servers running ERPs and SCMs and MES and other TLAs with poorly-optimized giant databases I don't personally touch those. But still I suspect the same truths apply whether you're talking about "big iron" computers or literal metals: when evaluating the strength of an average weldment on an ordinary conveyor or machine, we like to say "Steel is cheap, engineering is expensive." Obviously there are situations when you have to employ more rigor and do the FEA, but typically, when choosing between a just-right solution and one that's obviously strong enough, just overbuilding it is a lot more efficient in terms of value. With 21 of the pictured $150 Samsung 1TB 990 Pro SSDs and, hypothetically, $1000 for this card, you're looking at $4,150 for this storage solution. If that solves your problem and lets you apply off-the-shelf Postgres and JSON and unoptimized queries, do it! That money only buys a handful of site visits and maybe a week of engineering hours to change a system that may involve dozens of users, tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and rigid requirements from upstream and downstream...maybe you can change those eventually, and it would definitely have been cheaper if all the stakeholders had a fundamental understanding of the compute requirements of full table scans and non-native blobs and designed their business around those mathematics, but that doesn't sound likely.