> Engineers often see a database simply as a place to store things, it's just a box. As you said, it's just humans, really. How many self-help books about orga

> Engineers often see a database simply as a place to store things, it's just a box. As you said, it's just humans, really. How many self-help books about organisation are out there? Organising your files, organising your clothes, organising your tools -- it's not a solved problem, there are always tradeoffs, and it's very easy to just choose the same solution you've used before, because you already understand how to implement it. TBH, I think oftentimes it's the right choice to just use any old tool as a hammer[0]. In many (perhaps not most?) cases, you're probably going to save more time implementing the organisational strategy you already know than you are implementing the technically-correct strategy. Though, you probably still need to do some quick maths on that tradeoff -- what's the cost of choosing the solution you know? By way of example, when we were rebuilding our incident management stack at Dropbox, we spent a lot of time considering our database structure, because one of our key design goals was to reduce friction. Our existing tool had appalling load times, which was (in part) causing users to avoid declaring incidents. We knew we had to create a very low-friction experience to encourage users to declare incidents, and that this had long-term ramifications. So, myself and the other senior engineer on the team invested several days between us determining the correct design for our database. Conversely, when I was building a tool to do some trouble ticket automation, I just implemented things in a simple manner with questionable performance -- because the implementation only cost me 30 minutes, and the impact of a 5-second scan vs. a 0.5-second query was essentially nil (the absolute worst-case scenario was an automated process took a few extra seconds and cost a couple cents a day). No reason to overoptimise. 0. Adam Savage even titled his book "Every Tool's A Hammer"!