3 ms·
I think you are drastically overestimating the ability of most devs to write performant code. Do you really think you're going to get better results asking dev
by Icathian 3y ago
I think you are drastically overestimating the ability of most devs to write performant code. Do you really think you're going to get better results asking devs who, by your measure cannot write good declarative SQL schemas and queries, to roll their own data storage and retrieval raw?
RDBMS software is complicated in large part due to it needing to serve a wide range of use cases, so a custom-built version might end up simpler to use, but you can't sell me that Joe Backend-Dev is going to outperform however many million dev-hours have gone into Postgres.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoI generally agree, but I think there’s a mistake here comparing something like Postgres to hand-rolled code: Postgres has to implement generally safe optimizations and so cannot take advantage of invariants that cannot be expressed in a way it understands. For a specific task, with well-understood data, I’d expect a typical programmer should be able to outperform Postgres with a bit of effort. The trade-off here is maintenance cost and a lack of flexibility due to specialization. So, IMO, one ought to reach for an SQL database first and then something else to optimize hot paths as determined by a profiler.