[appplication]

Designing data intensive applications is frequently recommended, but is 6 years old now. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but the state of distributed compute is a lot different than it was 6 years ago. Do you feel like it holds up well?

A year of two ago I read Ralph Kimball’s seminal The Data Warehouse Toolkit. While I could see why it’s still often recommended, it was showing its age in many ways (though a fair bit older than DDIA). It felt like a mix of best practices and dated advice, but it was hard to tell for certain what was what.

[LAC-Tech]

A lot of what DDIA covers is pretty fundamental stuff. I expect it will age fairly well.

It's not really a book about 'best practices', despite the name. It's more like an encyclopaedia, covering every approach out there, putting them in context, linking to copious reference papers, and talking about their properties on a very conceptual and practical level. It's not really like 'hey use this database vendor!!!'.

[diarrhea]

Concur. In large parts, the book feels like it's making the forest of fundamental research papers, published across decades, accessible by putting them into context, ordering them and "dumbing them down" for us mere mortals.

Most of that research is decades old. I specifically remember Lamport timestamps. Not only has that held up, it's unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. Most topics covered are as fundamental as the two generals problem; almost philosophical.

No database vendor can solve the issues around two concurrently existing write masters. Sync will be necessary, conflicts will occur. A concrete vendor could only hope to make that less painful (CRDTs for automatic conflict resolution, ...). That's kind of the level that book operates at.

[EspressoGPT]

DDIA partly goes into implementation details (for example, transaction implementations in popular databases), but the reasoning behind it is always rather fundamental. I think it's going to age well unless some breakthrough happens – but even then only that particular section would be affected.

[dboreham]

> but is 6 years old now

Hmm. The techniques used today were invented in the 1970s-80s.