4 ms·

Skype open-sourced their architecture way back, using PL/Proxy to route calls based on shard. It works, is quite elegant, handled 50% of all international phone

• Keyframe 2y ago
  Skype has had from the beginning the requirement that all database access must be implemented through stored procedures. That presentation starts with hard violence.
  • Tostino 2y ago
    If the database team designed a thoughtful API with stored procedures, this can actually be a quite nice way to interact with a database for specific uses. Being 100% hard and fast on that rule seems like a bad idea though.
    • dboreham 2y ago
      Fashionable 20 years ago but thankfully everyone who had that bee in their bonnet seems to have retired.
      • Kinrany 2y ago
        It'll make a comeback once stored procedures can be easily written in real programming languages using standard tools.
        • sgarland 2y ago
          You already can [0]. C, PL/Perl, PL/Python, and PL/Tcl exist out of the box, in addition to PL/pgSQL, which I assume you were implying isn’t a “real programming language.” [0]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/server-programming.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/server-programming.h...
          • Kinrany 2y ago
            Sure, even PL/Rust is available. But what does the deployment pipeline look like, from version control to a live instance?
            • sgarland 2y ago
              That is described in the link, in section 36.18, albeit for C. If you have another language, i assume you get to figure out how to make it work. [0]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/extend-pgxs.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/extend-pgxs.html
          • fulafel 2y ago
            Few people seem to be using these. At a guess the dev experience is not great.
            • sgarland 2y ago
              Frankly, I think devs need to stop being such primmadonnas about DX. Not everything has a slick UI that does most of the work for you. Take Linux, for example: you have to email your PR as a patch, inline as plaintext to a mailing list. Yet somehow, they manage, and it had an incredibly active community.
              • fulafel 2y ago
                Alternative programming languages are all about DX. PL/pgsql is turing complete after all.
                • 2y ago
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
      • tomnipotent 2y ago
        I think it's a perfectly fine approach in 2025 now that that CI/CD have proliferated and you're less likely to run into a human DBA arbitrarily blocking deployments. It was always the feudal lord mentality of DB operations that made relying so much on stored procedures undesirable.
  • sgarland 2y ago
    I would much rather this than letting devs write their own queries, ORM or not. But then, I own the DBs, and I am constantly dealing with the result of poor schema and query decisions.
  • fmajid 2y ago
    Righteous violence. One of the benefits of stored procedures they don't mention is SECURITY DEFINER, which is like setuid. You can for instance have a user table with login and hashed password, have a stored procedure that can verify login and password, without giving SELECT access to the user table to the database user your application use. Stored procedures also block SQL injection attacks.