Simon Willison’s Weblog

Before we even started writing the database, we first wrote a fully-deterministic event-based network simulation that our database could plug into. This system let us simulate an entire cluster of interacting database processes, all within a single-threaded, single-process application, and all driven by the same random number generator. We could run this virtual cluster, inject network faults, kill machines, simulate whatever crazy behavior we wanted, and see how it reacted. Best of all, if one particular simulation run found a bug in our application logic, we could run it over and over again with the same random seed, and the exact same series of events would happen in the exact same order. That meant that even for the weirdest and rarest bugs, we got infinity “tries” at figuring it out, and could add logging, or do whatever else we needed to do to track it down.

[...] At FoundationDB, once we hit the point of having ~zero bugs and confidence that any new ones would be found immediately, we entered into this blessed condition and we flew.

[...] We had built this sophisticated testing system to make our database more solid, but to our shock that wasn’t the biggest effect it had. The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size.

— Will Wilson, on FoundationDB # 13th February 2024, 5:20 pm

In general, relying only on natural keys is a nightmare. Double nightmare if it’s PII. Natural keys only work if you are flawlessly omniscient about the domain. And you aren’t.

— Jacques Chester # 11th April 2021, 10:48 pm

I get asked a lot about learning to code. Sure, if you can. It’s fun. But the real action, the crux of things, is there in the database. Grab a tiny, free database like SQLite. Import a few million rows of data. Make them searchable. It’s one of the most soothing activities known to humankind, taking big piles of messy data and massaging them into the rigid structure required of a relational database. It’s true power.

— Paul Ford # 16th December 2020, 5:35 am

I called it normalization because then President Nixon was talking a lot about normalizing relations with China. I figured that if he could normalize relations, so could I.

— Edgar F. Codd # 7th March 2020, 11:12 pm

Relational databases are a commodity now, but they power a much larger fraction of the world’s economy that AI ever will. And no company has a “relational database strategy”.

— Erik Bernhardsson # 8th October 2018, 12:20 pm

[Drizzle] won’t be a get-out-of-jail-free card for very write-heavy applications but I bet it will do wonders for heavily replicated, heavily federated, read-heavy architectures (you know, normal stuff).

— Richard Crowley # 8th March 2009, 6:05 pm

Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication into core PostgreSQL, so as to leave room for development of competing solutions [...] However, it is becoming clear that this policy is hindering acceptance of PostgreSQL to too great an extent, compared to the benefit it offers to the add-on replication projects. Users who might consider PostgreSQL are choosing other database systems because our existing replication options are too complex to install and use for simple cases.

— Tom Lane # 7th July 2008, 2:08 pm