3 ms·

100s of engineers all coding against the same Postgres database becomes a pain. Lack of decentralization leads to silly outages due to people sharing resources

• schainks 2y ago
  Can you say more about this? Seems like an organizational / communication problem than a technical one.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    Not the parent but I've seen this scenario a few times. Essentially what you get is random groups of devs (often you never even knew they existed or were messing with your DB) who mount a DoS attack (not their intention but that's the result). Long lived transactions, unindexed queries, unexpected deadlocks, etc etc. Worst thing is their reaction is that your database sucks. So no amount of education will fix the problem. They think you're the problem. So you end up with a defensive architecture where the blast radius for any single act of stupidity is limited.
• vrosas 2y ago
  In my experience it's really hard to prevent issues like this. RDBMS's kind of push you to keeping everything in the same database to take advantage of foreign keys and other features when in reality different data types will need their own source of record. I consider myself more experienced than most and I still fell into this trap in recent memory, failing to expect the scaling requirements for one of my tables until it was too late.
• simonw 2y ago
  That's a great problem to hold off on tackling until you have hundreds of engineers.