Yesterday's Stories
From The Consensus Pierre Zemb from Clever Cloud Pierre Zemb is a staff engineer at Clever Cloud where he's building data layers API-compatible with services like Redis, PostgreSQL, and etcd on top of FoundationDB. The latest in our series interviewing developers working on software infrastructure.
Recently, I looked into how common polymorphic associations actually are in relational databases — a performance-hostile pattern built around a discriminated foreign key that ORMs (Rails, Django, Hibernate), CRM platforms (Salesforce), and 1C generate automatically. The front page of a typical online store, or the activity feed of a CRM, is built by exactly this kind of query: a base table is LEFT JOIN-ed to every possible subtype through a (type, id) pair of columns.That earlier article an...