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DATABASE_WORMS

                                             April    9, 2010
                                             October 18, 2013

                                                     From a conversation at an
  There's a technical religious                      SF Perl gathering at Naan
  war out there that I've never                      and Curry.
  seen written up anywhere--
  The C Programmers vs. the
  Database People.
                                     The people who work on the database
  I think you can see hints          software itself are of course, also
  of this with Torvalds              C programmers...  this team A vs
  decision to re-work the            team B model is an oversimplication.
  core ideas of monotone
  in C (git)-- yes, he needed
  better performance, but I
  think he was also grossed-           You can argue that the Big Data
  out by their technical               world is another case of C programmers
  choices: C++ and sqlite.             striking back against the RDBMS plague.

  C programmers think "databases"          They too, have efficiency arguments
  are over-used, and much prefer           of course, involving scaling
  their structs and hand-crafted           across multiple machines.
  binary formats.
                                           Notably they're most common
                                           use cases aren't very ACID.
  The really interesting one is a
  jwz piece titled "when the
  database worms eat your brain".

  http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html

A summary of the Mork affair: when jwz was
working on the Netscape browser, he used bbd
as a data format for bookmarks and history,
with some carefully tuned up indicies. When
Netscape put a guy named McKusker in charge,
he invented a new data format of his own          The Firefox crew switched
(hear the alarm bells?) called Mork.  This        to an sqlite backend
data format was apparently pretty brain-dead      circa Firefox 3.  This is
(see jwz's entertaining rants),                   obviously a saner choice,
                                                  though I think it still
More are over here:                               has some problems.

  http://www.jwz.org/hacks/mork.pl

   The interesting bit-- we had
   to get to it eventually you
   know-- somehow, in jwz's mind
   McKusker thought he was doing
   something databasey (or maybe
   he was just selling it that way?).

   But actually, a *real* database person would
   look at this use-case and probably figure          Except for me, of
   that bdb or sqlite was a good choice, and          course, but I'm
   hand-rolling a new format of any sort was          pretty weird:
   obviously the wrong way to go about it.
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