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by rippercushions
1291 days ago
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> If the problem warrants the use of a graph data model I think this is the crux of the problem. I once worked on MegaBank's peer to peer payment app, where somebody had figured that the people sending money to each other was a directed graph, so they should use a graph DB to store it. And when Azure's sales team convinced them that CosmosDB could handle relational data and graphs and documents, they bought it hook, line and sinker. Needless to say, this was a terrible idea: an RDBMS could have handled it just fine, and because everything else was stored in an RDBMS (which despite the marketing fluff is quite different internally in CosmosDB), now doing any kind of join was a huge pain in the ass. As a cherry on top, they were now locked into CosmosDB, which has completely incomprehensible ("request units per second") but very, very high pricing particularly for graphs. Whee! |
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Since Apple (not entirely sure about Google/Android) denies anyone direct access to the NFC hardware in an iDevice, and presents a (mostly) anonymised unique payment token to the wank instead, reconstituting a people connection graph via tracking the fund movement across card accounts poses a challenge. Tracking the fund movement across conventional wank accounts is easier.
But, if the graph data model is devised correctly, it is still possible to incrementally build it out into a rich graph outlining social and material world connections for a given customer either for product placement or nefarious purposes (wanks do sell the transaction history and more to external parties such as Equifax without obtaining the customer's consent). Akin to a Facebook social graph. A gradual graph build-out is, in fact, a great feature of graph databases – a fluid «schema» (for the lack of a better term) that can evolve incrementally in place as new facts about the data become known, without causing a disruption to a production system. If the overall design is sound.
The problem is that traditional wanks are not well poised when it comes to technology related matters due to technology… not being their core competency. Quite the opposite, they see tech as a liability as such projects are driven by financially competent, somewhat business competent but entirely technically incompetent folks. Therefore such projects nearly always fail, technology is blamed in the end, and the CEO/CFO draws approriate (typically, inappropriate) conclusions. So the Megawank in question likely tried to shoehorn a poorly designed graph data model (more likely, an existing relational model) using an A.M.A.Z.I.N.G! multimodel! graph! CosmoDB database whilst being clueless about what they were trying to do. Of course, Microsoft sales people, unwittingly slouching nearby, were singing melliferous songs joy and delight reciting telltale stories of CosmosDB. Profit.
Neobanks, on the other hand, are driven entirely by technologists, and they can pull off such a feat easily or more easily.