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And now your system can scale better, saving you enough money to justify the optimization work long-term. The StackOverflow folks famously take their DB design

And now your system can scale better, saving you enough money to justify the optimization work long-term. The StackOverflow folks famously take their DB design and performance very seriously, and now they do not need an army of overpriced "architects" to plug the performance holes with more insane and expensive complexity. https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance Coincidentally I just wrote up a post about the importance of minding your database skills: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-are-not-good-to-have.html https://renegadeotter.com/2023/11/12/your-database-skills-ar...

paxys 3y ago
Stack Overflow is the poster child of over-optimizing DB engineering while neglecting every other product feature that end users actually want, so not sure if that should be your example.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  There is a case to be made they took it to an extreme, but there is too much going in the other direction as well. It's not like most teams are working on the meat of the product anyway - they probably spend 40% of their time running a small project on Kubernetes and getting rid of daily security warnings from NPM.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Somehow they managed to become one of the most important websites for software developers despite neglecting every product feature you miss.
  - paxys 3y ago
    They have never made a dollar of profit in their 15 years of operation and just sold themselves to a private equity firm for pennies. "Most important website for software developers" doesn't really mean anything unless one can also be a sustainable company in the process.
    - selcuka 3y ago
      Was it because of "neglecting every other product feature that end users actually want"?
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Failure to monetize is usually the exact opposite of failure to please users.
- hobs 3y ago
  Have you seen their code base? They did not over optimize the DB engineering by any means that I could tell. Having a simple monolithic database is not optimizing your DB engineering by any means. edit: and inventing a better ORM doesn't count either.

paxys 3y ago

Stack Overflow is the poster child of over-optimizing DB engineering while neglecting every other product feature that end users actually want, so not sure if that should be your example.

renegade-otter 3y ago
There is a case to be made they took it to an extreme, but there is too much going in the other direction as well. It's not like most teams are working on the meat of the product anyway - they probably spend 40% of their time running a small project on Kubernetes and getting rid of daily security warnings from NPM.
adrianN 3y ago
Somehow they managed to become one of the most important websites for software developers despite neglecting every product feature you miss.
- paxys 3y ago
  They have never made a dollar of profit in their 15 years of operation and just sold themselves to a private equity firm for pennies. "Most important website for software developers" doesn't really mean anything unless one can also be a sustainable company in the process.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    Was it because of "neglecting every other product feature that end users actually want"?
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Failure to monetize is usually the exact opposite of failure to please users.
hobs 3y ago
Have you seen their code base? They did not over optimize the DB engineering by any means that I could tell. Having a simple monolithic database is not optimizing your DB engineering by any means. edit: and inventing a better ORM doesn't count either.