Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I’m a DBRE, which means it’s somehow always my fault until proven otherwise. And even then, it’s usually on me to work around the insane schema dreamt up by the devs.

Multi-tenant DBs can work fine as long as every app has its own users, everyone goes through a connection pooler / load balancer, and every user has rate limits. You want to write shitty queries that time out? Not my problem. Your GraphQL BFF bullshit is trying to make 10,000 QPS? Nope, sorry, try again later.

EDIT: I say “not my problem,” but as mentioned, it inevitably becomes my problem. Because “just unblock them so the site is functional” is far more attractive to the C-Suite than “slow down velocity to ensure the dev teams are doing things right.”



Or, you just avoid doing multi tenet from the start and none of those become your problem to unblock. What’s the downside?


Done that as well; it still becomes my problem because teams without RDBMS knowledge eventually break it, and… then I get paged.

Full Stack is a lie, and the sooner companies accept that and allow people to specialize again, and to pay for the extra headcount, the better off everyone will be.


I disagree I guess. Multiple companies I’ve worked at have broken up their shared db into many dbs that individual teams own the operations of, and it works just fine. At significant scale in traffic and # of eng. No central dbas needed - smaller databases require much less skills to manage. The teams that own them learn enough.


I agree. My gripe was everybody in the same schema with a global “app” user.


You forgot the modern mantra - dev team is always right!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: