Well meaning people often ask the wrong questions on the journey to solutions

I saw a question in a job posting today that asked: “What is the hardest SQL problem you have ever seen?” 😊 I think that is the wrong question to ask, because it is evident that you have reached the end of your line, or will soon reach that point, and are trying to throw people at the problem — let me hire one more SQL guru, and we can solve all our scalability issues.

But can we?

The hardest SQL problem I have faced is at the beginning of a project where you know you must build something very complex. Soon everything will be taken over by SQL until you end up with a dumb web page run mostly by stored procedure or SQL within a data access call.

Everything you learned, including object-oriented programming and all of it — becomes a tool to hide the fact that the data is coming from a database that struggles to handle data ingestion with constant queries from users which only gets worse over time.

For the past twenty years, I have seen design patterns and architects struggling with this problem. Doing anything and everything to forget about SQL and database, while failing spectacularly at the effort.

This is exactly why we invented Reactor — you no longer have to deal with this anymore.