9 Comments

That's an amazing article, thanks for sharing, Pat. 👏🏻👏🏻

Unfortunately, I've seen some big companies applying this mess where each application accesses the other application's data directly because it's easier for the developer building a new application since he/she doesn't have to ask another team to expose a (new) API. And I agree with you here, it is not easy to change that in the short-medium term.

By the way, this kind of scenario where everyone puts their hands on everyone's data without a public API to intermediate the integration is what I call "The Orgy of Data" 😬

Although nowadays it is controversial to talk about building APIs to integrate applications through databases, there are many approaches to enforce an API to communicate and integrate via databases, such as:

- views

- stored procedures

- tables for integration-only

- events and signals

- grants and schemas

- replication and CDC

But exposing the schema is not one of them 👊🏻

Expand full comment

At least a database is structured(ish) data. Too much of my career was weaning 'power users' off spreadsheets

Expand full comment

Thanks for the article, with some clear reccommendations in the conclusion. This was exactly what we were thinking when we created Alan ( https://alan-platform.com ). It makes this the only way of working, taking away the need for discipline. And at the same time makes it very easy and safe to do so. In this way it keeps your application landscape flexible at all times.

Expand full comment

Great article! Minor point: it's nigh-on, not neigh on.

Expand full comment

It is the greatest of many great tragedies of the world's tech stacks that we are stuck with SQL. Most of the problems you describe are problems with SQL, not with the relational model.

Expand full comment