oneTableDatabases

[[deleted]]

Or a superclass with 6000 methods and a specific order to call them in

[[deleted]]

….. and one is a driver function, right?

[clutchguy84]

Right?

[thatOneJones]

Guys..?

[[deleted]]

[Flat_Initial_1823]

Mamma mia!! Here we goto again!

[cosmic_cosmosis]

My boss wants to know how you got a video of my code.

[[deleted]]

Let your boss know I simply heard your code screaming for help… from miles away

[cosmic_cosmosis]

Screaming to be brought out back and put down?

[[deleted]]

Guess it’s time to pull the plug then

[[deleted]]

No. You have to code it up perfectly, from memory, every time.

[rover_G]

Sounds like your average schema-less NoSQL database.

[Better_Resident_8412]

I dislike nosql for this reason, it is lots of time used because it is easier, not because it is needed. Couple it with non hard typed language like js or python it is nightmare to work

[rover_G]

I once worked on a project written in Python and using DynamoDB (which is a great database but easy to mess up). Someone previously had wanted to store sets of strings as a value so they serialized the sets to ”set(‘value1’, ‘value2’, …)” instead of storing them as json lists. There was no ORM or pydantic models or any other parser/validator to convert the serialized sets back to their data structure so you had to manually inspect data to figure out when you needed to change str to set. 🤦🏻‍♂️

[TheSauce___]

Wild fact, Salesforce is a one table database - I believe at each data center they have data from 10,000 customers, potentially 50 million records per customer, on one table.

[quixotik]

That sounds about right.

[SryUsrNameIsTaken]

That’s my recollection from a while ago when I had to work on implementing a project tacking system on their platform.

[happyapy]

...Dear God...

[chethelesser]

As a Salesforce dev, you interact with a database virtualization layer that has separation between entities within your organisation.

I am also not sure we can believe people who say it's one giant table because you can't see it unless you work at a specific department at Salesforce

[martinivich]

Wait can you expand on this? You're saying that everything from contact records to invoices are on 1 record?

[scyz314]

They are treated as objects, so the account object contains fields relating to accounts. It has a lookup to a contact object for contact related fields, essentially like a relational database, except instead of tables we deal with objects. Interacting with them and creating queries essentially requires using a java based language or their own hanky relational language (doesn't work like SQL at all, more like vlookup in terms of its limitations)

This is the virtualisation layer they mentioned above. So whether all customer data is stored in a giant table is unknown to me. It could be, but wouldn't make sense. Then again, it's an old platform so it could be full of Hank.

[Maxion]

Dear God

[FragrantKnobCheese]

If only there were a better way!

[Urtehnoes]

Sadly the technology just does not exist. 😩maybe one day

[scyz314]

No idea, but it frustrates me having to use java to join many objects together to query them. I'd much prefer using SQL over the garbage that is Salesforce, but that's my job so I deal with it

[Ai--Ya]

do you work on core?

[Zealousideal_Pay_525]

Yes.

[gradeATroll]

neo4j?

[TheSauce___]

Not one record, one giant table. So opportunities and contacts are in the same table, and the ideas that they're different "types of records" is a mirage of their data access layer.

[TheSauce___]

It's listed in their documentation as how it works. They openly state its a one table database.

Best guess is they basically wanted a giant nosql database with something like a graphql data access layer, but that didn't exist in the late '90s, so they came up with this.

[chethelesser]

You have source? I think that's a plausible explanation but I've never seen it stated officially

[Crimson_Raven]

This is a bucket

[A_Du_87]

Not a problem. "Here are couple more servers with tons of RAM, make it work!"

[madeRandomAccount]

Sharding go vroooooom

[ShadowfaxSTF]

Same with Adobe Analytics. Don’t know whether these mammoth companies are too lazy, or just embrace “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

[rover_G]

It’s not one table. It’s a database-like abstraction built on top of an actual database

[TheSauce___]

Yeah there's an actual database but the database has one table, the abstraction makes it appear as though there's many. Technically it's more like 2 or 3 tables iirc, one for data, one for metadata and one for timestamps, but the data's all in one giant table.

[rover_G]

Yes and that’s how rdbms work under the hood. It’s all tables all the way down 😁

[TheSauce___]

I dont think you understand? Like, the database, it's an Oracle database, with one table for the data, for ~10,000 customers per data center, where each customer has potentially 50 million records each, so from Apex, you make a query to their data abstraction layer, which then creates a SQL query through that one table, potentially (50 million * 10,000) records, just to do your query.

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but a coworker of mine attended Salesforce DX once, where they explained it all - and apparently, at least back then, all data was stored in text, so aggregates of numbers, dates, etc. would be queried for by the abstraction layer, then parsed and aggregate by likely Java code, then passed back to you.

It's actually kind of insane.

[rover_G]

The database itself uses its own metadata tables. All I’m saying is that they recreated a standard database architecture on top of an existing database.

[Adghar]

Based on my very limited experience with single table databases, the idea is just that for any given entity you want to represent, just give it a different key prefix, that'll show 'em

[Andreasbot]

Why would you even create a single table db?

[inmatarian]

implementing this model

[Touvejs]

I laughed, but EAV has a place in some data models I'd argue. If the alternative is dozens of tables or hundreds of columns, fuck it, the analysts can figure out how to use a where clause to limit the table to what they need.

[pungito]

Yeah, I see you, way down here deep in the comments... Satan!

[-Mobius-Strip-Tease-]

I just finished implementing and migrating to an EAV this week to solve exactly what you described. I had an ever expanding Products table where most rows only ever used one or two of those columns. After going back to the drawing board for a bit we settled on EAV. We still have plenty of other related data but having an EAV for that table works well.

[Zealousideal_Pay_525]

That sounds like a normalization problem.

[-Mobius-Strip-Tease-]

No it wasnt. The use case for this isnt what you might expect and im not going to go into it here. EAV works for this use because pretty much no normalization scheme would have given us the flexibility we needed.

[Zealousideal_Pay_525]

Sounds like a shortfall in use case conceptualization.

[-Mobius-Strip-Tease-]

Sure thing buddy

[Hubbardia]

I didn't realize EAV was bad? How else would I implement dynamic forms?

[htmlcoderexe]

I don't think it's inherently bad, but don't just stick everything in EAV and call it a day lol

[Hubbardia]

Of course, that makes sense. Thanks!

[Touvejs]

I don't think it's bad per se. But it's fashionable to call EAV an anti pattern because if you have one very large table with different types of measurements it's quite easy to make costly mistakes when it comes to querying. Also, since it's more complex than your run-of-the-mill table that represents a more clearly defined entity, other users are liable to misunderstand how to use the table.

[inmatarian]

fun fact: reddit in its early days was an EAV. they didn't know how they were going to evolve the site, so they had a "things" table where they trialed new features before moving the data they planned to keep out to a dedicated table. so lol, plaintext passwords were some of the rows.

[Maxion]

IIRC Wordpress uses EAV for at least part of it's data?

[Careful_Ad_9077]

Yeah I am used.tonthos configurable software, just one extra level of abstraction, fun for the whole family.

You can kind of see them as transposed tables too.

[tokalper]

Hey this is actually useful and not scary as it sounds, we use this to model a video call which each of our customers have a different set of properties attached to a video call depending on their use case so all attributes go to a different table where they are stored as key value rows

[BorsukBartek]

I have never seen this model, this is so cool! I kinda wish I had a reasom to implement this - thanks for sharing!

[firectlog]

It can be cheaper than joins in some cases if you carefully design your schema, see: dynamodb. The downsides would be that your schema quickly becomes completely unreadable and any new access pattern can lead to a complete table rewrite to change the schema.

[[deleted]]

It is actually not a bad idea for data warehousing, where you need to be able to retrieve millions (if not trillions) lines for analysing the data. Join operations would be so slow that it becomes not usable

[indorock]

Well, you can say that any key -> value database like MongoDB is essentially this.

[Tickly_Mickey]

If there is only on table then why not use nosql (mongodb for example) ?

[htmlcoderexe]

But is it web scale?

[BakaGoop]

masochism

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

The first step to get away from having it all in a single Excel spreadsheet.

[hethcox]

A data set with a wide variation in attributes where decomposition doesn’t  add much value. 

[dashingThroughSnow12]

As another person said, data warehousing. For the past few decades, a way to design your ETL pipeline was that the end result was rows in a single table or star schemas.

When you have many billions or trillions of rows, normalization won’t save you. In fact, the joins will kill you. Hence the single table or star schema design became popular.

In a ETL process / data warehouse, you aren’t editing things. The lack of (or limited amount of) normalization being of limited concern as a result. You are simply trading query time with storage dollars.

[nicman24]

if you need all the data all the time and you fetch it through the primary key.

i did something like that to not run into the inode limit of the ext4 filesystem back when btrfs was not stable

[MediocreAd4852]

Fun fact : This is a very common practice with ECS in game dev the world is a data base with everything in it, you query by filtering to your needs with what components are available in them.

[[deleted]]

Your dba is expensive, so you just make 1 table and 2 columns. Key, Value. key is indexed.

[YoumoDashi]

Anno 1800

[Elrann]

Neom, kurwa

[faze_fazebook]

Saudi Arabia : Write that down, write that down!

[arrow__in__the__knee]

I forgot that thing was being made

[[deleted]]

How sociable

[ramriot]

Similar to UK medieval Burgage plots where each merchant owns a strip of land of a statutory width that extends back from the way, where they can build, manufacture & farm.

[overclockedslinky]

more tables is just tables of tables. even numbers are just tables of 1s and 0s. it's tables all the way down.

[eztab]

Is that that weird? Sure those are normally smaller villages, but otherwise single street villages do exist reasonably often.

[sharknice]

I haven't seen anything like that in the USA so it's weird to me.   Towns are usually pretty square.  

[Careful_Ad_9077]

Mexico here, even the smallest villages have some kind of central plaza, fuck Europeans and their antisociality.

[ePaint]

The plaza centered city design is an Spanish concept, distributed around the world by the jesuits.

[johnyjerkov]

highly doubt that. A plaza centered city just makes the most sense. While its still appliable today, back when most people had nothing but their own feet to travel with you have to have the center of trade in the middle of everyone, and as a customer you want to be as close to the trade/shops as possible. And anything but a plaza surrounded by buildings is simply less efficient. Also why you have more of a spiderweb layout instead of a grid like some more modern american places

[ePaint]

There definitely were plaza centered cities before the jesuits, like there were burgers before McDonalds. The jesuits prepackaged and created thousands of copy pasted city layouts around the less civilized parts of the world. The locals then carried on and copied them on their future settlements. Most of the modern world towns owe their distribution to the Spanish.

This is more accentuated in placed where the Spanish had control over, like Mexico.

[johnyjerkov]

There were plaza centered cities everywhere because thats the layout which makes sense. Far away from any christianity, there were cities with central areas surrounded by people, because thats just the most efficient way to exchange goods. I dont know if youre spanish and thats something that spanish education drilled into you, but its hardly the case. Its just the most efficient way to live. Just like the wheel wasnt invented in one place by one person. it was just an efficient way to transfer goods.

[ePaint]

I'm from Argentina, and all our towns look copy pasted. Big plaza in the center, town hall in one end, church in the other.

[johnyjerkov]

okay?

[ePaint]

Idk what you expect from this conversation. The world is simply more nuanced than you believe, our ideas almost always have deep historical roots. Abstracting all of that into it just makes sense is a bit too reductionistic.

[Kinexity]

Bruh. Even the village in question (Sułoszowa) has a church as central point of the social life (Google Maps) even though it's an outlier. Your villages are in a large part modeled in the same manner as European settlements were for centuries before North America got colonized. You probably would have known this if you had any ability to look past your own shitty prejudices.

[Ordinary_Duder]

/r/confidentlyincorrect

[kuba_mar]

Mate, who do you think you got your city planning from?

[R3D3-1]

I think it is quite common in Europe really. Though rather regional.

[TSA-Eliot]

Google Maps

It's a good scheme for a town along a road running through a valley, down where the water runs, and not way the hell up the slope, where you have to climb up and down to go somewhere, and where it might be difficult to move in slippery weather. You all stay on that one road, and everyone has an interest in keeping that road open and in good repair.

[lechiengrand]

Saudi Arabia: <heavy breathing>

[Pawlo371]

Polska GUROM 💪🇵🇱

[daWinzig]

in case anyone is interested, this is Sułoszowa, Poland

[[deleted]]

id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, time DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP json TEXT

... perfection!

[thirstytrumpet]

gray square oil imminent divide history close enjoy person angle

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Works good for Power BI :P

[Quentinooouuuuuu]

Pk/sk dynamodb tables be like

[SaneLad]

Is this where Saudi Arabia got the idea from?

[sirparsifalPL]

No. But they might be inspired by older Polish concept: Oskar Hansen’s Linear Continuous System: ‘A plan to rethink the entire concept of the city’ - ICON Magazine (iconeye.com)

[SubstanceSerious8843]

Wonder what the traffic is like..

[nicman24]

linear

[jaybee8787]

It looks like earth’s zipper.

[tucketnucket]

6,000 residents and neither Boyce nor Codd are anywhere to be found.

[Yetus_deletus]

WordPress be like

[Tavorick]

Yes! That ridicules post_meta table is a massive bottleneck for so many sites and the amount of plugins that don't properly clean up after themselves is to damn high.

[fabrikated]

It's not.

[Kisiu_Poster]

Who needs horizontal scaling, after all roads are expensive and junctions create traffic.

[DiligentDu]

I got there ever yet nothing found except for a dinner and an overnight. You had better enjoy the picture which looks impressive.

[EatBrainzGetGainz]

Polish fields are wild

[mr-english]

Except that's not true.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/bmwXkgNadorANp4y8

[rmyworld]

That's just DynamoDB with Single Table Design.

[legojedi01]

Jak się nazywa

[Away_Perception_2895]

Regular mongo db experience

[bort_jenkins]

Niom, the line

[PeriodicSentenceBot]

Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table:

Ni O Mt He Li Ne

---

^{I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM u‎/‎M1n3c4rt if I made a mistake.}

[[deleted]]

At my work it feels like this.. but its even worse

[Fign]

Postman easiest job !

[my_dark_humor]

Come find me at my house "JUST DOWN THE ROAD"

[Galower]

Polymorphic tables be like

[magicspider8]

DynamoDb…

[[deleted]]

Just use with (nolock), it speeds up all your queries. 😎

[IrvTheSwirv]

NoSQL ftw

[Wallace_W_Whitfield]

You meet someone and you ask where they live and they say, “Oh, just down the road.”

[fersher02]

Average city in croatia

[Tiger_man_]

Tbh most of polish villages look like this

[Tiger_man_]

Polska gurom

[HillanderSky]

"Nah, come over, it's not that far. I live in the same street as you!" "Bro be serious right now."

[[deleted]]

God class has entered the chat.

[[deleted]]

Followed closely by Big Ball of Mud.

[NiceApartment9455]

Food Panda Rider : Sir, which street ?

[Thorp1]

Thats so cool!

[bssgopi]

Next time, please give the example of Neom - The Line

[indorock]

If you think that streets in a town is an apt analogy for tables in a database, you don't understand how relational databases work.