very interesting thanks for the insight, I feel like there are broadly two camps of developers, one like yourself probably wants to know every last detail, and

very interesting thanks for the insight, I feel like there are broadly two camps of developers, one like yourself probably wants to know every last detail, and the other that are somewhat prefer to stay naive and taking the "declarative" part very broadly... there's a bit of cyclic relationship at play here, the data changes the query plan, and the query plan affects the performance, while the performance is being optimised by the engine. if the architecture is bad then sooner or later the engine runs out of tricks and performance suffers but then nobody never is quite sure whether the current architecture's good enough. I totally get the whole nosql that was the rage for a while... quick to prototype but I do believe once it's somewhat settled, moving the consolidated parts back to SQL is much easier to manage and optimise