This is: - brilliant! - hits right on🎯 - hard to argue with - big pile of💩for 🍏 - absolutely destroys gen-#AI narrative - funny on top of everything!

Firebase now has SQL. Yes, that's right! You can choose between NoSQL and SQL when it comes to managing your data. 🎥 On the next #FirebaseAfterHours, Peter and Nohe will be joined by Firebase product manager Tyler Crowe who will spill the beans on how you can use SQL in your mobile and web apps with Firebase Data Connect. Set a reminder →

Concrete example of the difference between theory and practice in systems engineering: When we were designing the storage system at @Dropbox (called "magic pocket") every new PhD graduate would say it was dumb to use a thousand-node MySQL cluster to store the mapping from file chunks to their locations in a million-node storage cluster. Instead they'd point out that a distributed hash table is a much more "efficient" way of storing this mapping with no need for a database. This is fine in theory but in practice you need to 1. run verifier jobs that walk over your indexes and make sure all the data is in the right place 2. dynamically adjust the amount of data on each node or cluster due to hardware issues or data center migrations 3. run queries over the metadata for auditing and forecasting and all manner of things 4. have a really simple codepath for committing a write to the system and not much is simpler than writing a single row to a DB. It turns out the simpler approach is better because the simpler approach works and can be maintained. All this stuff can be learned but it's much much easier to learn in an environment where you run into constraints on a daily basis.