They should run their own data center.

Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.

Analogies to other professions give your argument an air of legitimacy, with none.

There’s plenty of people in this world who are expert programmers without following any traditional path.

“Oh yeah, like who”, you say.

Con Kolivas, anaesthetist, work on kernel schedulers including the Staircase Deadline (RSDL) scheduler which was a precursor to the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and the Brain Fuck Scheduler and the ck Patchset.

I don’t say you cannot learn by yourself, my claim is you cannot learn without doing. Was that really unclear??

Avoid people who seek to be offended.

They always find a way to get what they seek.

I found it unusable due to out of memory errors with a billion row 8 column dataset.

It needs manual tuning to avoid those errors and I couldn’t find the right incantation, nor should I need to - memory management is the job of the db, not me. Far too flakey for any production usage.

No, I tried Clickhouse instead, which worked without crashing or manual memory tuning.

Search the issues of the duckdb GitHub there’s at least 110 open and closed oom (out of memory) and maybe 400 to 500 that reference “memory”.

> Search the issues of the duckdb GitHub there’s at least 110 open and closed oom (out of memory) and maybe 400 to 500 that reference “memory”.

Ah, missed this the first time around. Will check this out. And yes, I noticed that DuckDB rather aggressively tries to use the resources of your computer.

Understood: SQLite is to Postgres as DuckDB is to ClickHouse.

I don’t see the analogy, if you’re using it to excuse crashing on small data sets and indexes.

SQLite isn’t small and crashy, it’s small and reliable.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with the codebase/architecture if there’s so many memory problems.

And the absolute baseline requirement for a production database is no crashes.

I think the authors disagree with me, but I see it like a online analytical processing (OLAP) database, not like a OLTP (online transaction processing) database, so crashes are more tolerable.

Agree with your assessment of small and reliable for SQLite. Disagree with your baseline requirement. ACID is more important for me and does not contain `No crashes`.

I filed many issues. They were aurtoclosed after 3 months of inactivity

Yeah somewhere deep in Facebook they’ve put a black mark against my profile “filthy 300 CD player buyer, keep an eye on him”.

I like async and await.

I understand that some devs don’t want to learn async programming. It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.

On the other hand I feel like saying “go bloody learn async, it’s awesome and massively rewarding”.

Intuition is relative: when I first encountered unix-style synchronous, threaded IO, I found it awkward and difficult to reason about. I had grown up on the callback-driven classic Mac OS, where you never waited on the results of an IO call because that would freeze the UI; the asynchronous model felt like the normal and straightforward one.

> It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.

Funny, because it was supposed to be more intuitive than handling concurrency manually.

It is a tool. Some tools make you more productive after you have learned how to use them.

I find it interesting how in software, I repeatedly hear people saying "I should not have to learn, it should all be intuitive". In every other field, it is a given that experts are experts because they learned first.

> I find it interesting how in software, I repeatedly hear people saying "I should not have to learn, it should all be intuitive". In every other field, it is a given that experts are experts because they learned first.

Other fields don't have the same ability to produce unlimited incidental complexity, and therefore not the same need to rein it in. But I don't think there's any field which (as a whole) doesn't value simplicity.

I feel like it's missing my point. Using a chainsaw is harder than using a manual saw, but if you need to cut many trees it's a lot more efficient to first learn how to use the chainsaw.

Now if you take the chainsaw without spending a second thinking about learning to use it, and start using it like a manual saw... no doubt you will find it worse, but that's the wrong way to approach a chainsaw.

And I am not saying that async is "strictly better" than all the alternatives (in many situations the chainsaw is inferior to alternatives). I am saying that it is a tool. In some situations, I find it easier to express what I want with async. In others, I find alternatives better. At the end of the day, I am the professional choosing which tool I use for the job.

Except you're hearing it from someone who doesn't have a problem handling state machines and epoll and manual thread management.

Right but how do you expose your state machine and epoll logic to callers? As a blocking function? As a function that accepts continuations and runs on its own thread? Or with no interface such that anyone who wants to interoperate with you has to modify your state machine?

And that was intuitive and easy to learn?

I find state machines plus some form of message passing more intuitive than callbacks or any abstraction that is based on callbacks. Maybe I'm just weird.

When I did not know how to program, neither async nor message passing were intuitive. I had to learn, and now those are tools I can use when they make sense.

I never thought "programming languages are a failure, because they are not intuitive to people who don't know how to program".

My point being that I don't judge a tool by how intuitive it is to use when I don't know how to use it. I judge a tool by how useful it is when I know how to use it.

Obviously factoring in the time it took to learn it (if it takes 10 years to master a hammer, probably it's not a good hammer), but if you're fine with programming, state machines and message passing, I doubt that it will take you weeks to understand how async works. Took me less than a few hours to start using them productively.

It is. A lot.

But concurrency is hard and there's so much you syntax can do about it.

Some come to async from callbacks and others from (green)threads.

If you come from callbacks it is (almost) purely an upgrade, from threads is it more mixed.

Not true. I’ve used both, and I often prefer the explicitness of async await. It’s easier to reason about. The language guarantees that functions which aren’t async can’t be preempted - and that makes a lot of code much easier to write because you don’t need mutexes, atonics and semaphores everywhere. And that in turn often dramatically improves performance.

At least in JS. I don’t find async in rust anywhere near as nice to use. But that’s a separate conversation.

Frankly, async being non-intuitive does not imply that manual concurrency handling is less so; both are a PITA to do correctly.

It IS intuitive.

After you’ve learned the paradigm and bedded it down with practice.

It is an intrinsic tradeoff. With async there is significantly more code complexity with substantially higher performance and scalability.

If you don't need the performance and scalability then it is not unreasonable to argue that async isn't worth the engineering effort.

Or... we've learned it and don't like it? For legitimate reasons?

I can't follow that it's hard to learn and unintuitive

> It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.

Technically, promises/futures already did that in all of the mentioned languages. Async/await helped make it more user friendly, but the complexity was already there long before async/await arrived

Yes - I was really talking about "asynchronous programming" in general, not the async/await ways to do it in particular.

What different way of doing things?

If I want sequential execution, I just call functions like in the synchronous case and append .await. If I want parallel and/or concurrent execution, I spawn futures instead of threads and .await them. If I want to use locks across await points, I use async locks, anything else?

Really? async/await is the model that makes it really easy to ignore all the subtleties of asynchronous code and just go with it. You just need to trial and error where/when to put async/await keywords. It's not hard to learn. Just effort. If something goes wrong, then "that's just how things go these days".

The company is run by lizards in hoodies.

Now now don’t be mean to lizards

Sounds like the plot of a Hammer Horror movie.

HIVE of the DEAD!!!

Postgres is not the only database that does queues.

Any database that supports SKIP LOCKED is fine including MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle etc.

Even SQLite makes a fine queue not via skip locked but because writes are atomic.

SKIP LOCKED isn't quite enough to get a real MQ product. Oracle has a full blown MQ product inside it transactional with other data.

In particular you need the ability to wait for messages to appear in a queue without polling, and for a proper MQ you need things like message priority, exception queues, multi-queue listening, good scalability etc.