[refulgentis]

You're right, the email address example isn't clearcut -- its not an issue at all at registration. From there, you could never allow an email change. Or you could just add a layer for coordination, ex. we can imagine some global index that's only used for email changes and then somehow coordinates the partition change

My broad understanding is that you can always "patch" or "work around" any single objection to partitioning or sharding—like using extra coordination services, adding more layers, or creating special-case code.

But each of these patches adds complexity, reduces flexibility, and constrains your ability to cleanly refactor or adapt later. Sure, partitioning email addresses might neatly solve registration checks initially, but then email changes require extra complexity (such as maintaining global indices and coordinating between partitions).

In other words, the real issue isn't that partitioning fails in a single obvious way—it usually doesn’t—but rather that global state always emerges somewhere, inevitably. You can try to bury this inevitability with clever workarounds and layers, but eventually you find yourself buried under a mountain of complexity.

At some point, the question becomes: are we building complexity to solve genuine problems, or just to preserve the appearance that we're fully partitioned?

(My visceral objection to it is, coming from client-side dev virtually my entire career: if you don't need global state, why do you have the server at all? Just give use a .sqlite for my account, and store it for me on S3 for retrieval at will. And if you do need global state...odds are you or a nearby experienced engineer has Seen Some Shit, i.e. the horror that arises in a codebase worked on over years, doubling down on an seemingly small, innocuous, initial decision. and knows it'll never just be one neat design decision or patch)

[gabeio]

> but then email changes require extra complexity

Check the other partition for the user name. Create the new user with the same pointer (uuid, etc) to the user’s sqlite file, delete the old user in the other partition. Simple user name changed. Not really that complex to be honest. (After thinking this through I’m probably going to suggest us changing to sqlite at work…)

> if you don't need global state, why do you have the server at all?

2 reasons I can think of right off of the top of my head are:

- validation (preventing bad actors, or just bad input)

- calls to external services