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Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far


Disclaimer: This story took place when I was a junior developer for a previous employer ages ago. Some details might be fuzzy, and goes without saying this is entirely from my own POV so take everything here with humor and a grain of salt.

Perhaps some small part of the original team got tired of the bad development process, and it was quicker to just update stored procedures than having to wait for half an hour for compilation. The primitive KV databases strictly sticking to the four single-key IO operations meant APIs which affected multiple documents could not perform atomic writes. Due to the lack of atomic same-shard writes, in combination with the need for cross-service idempotency, “the architects” commissioned an entire checkpointing system to “help” with this issue.

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