Store data persistently so it can be looked up efficiently* sounds like a single problem.

How do we reconstruct past memory states? That's the fundamental problem.

Efficiency of storage or retrieval, reliability against loss or corruption, security against unwanted disclosure or modification are all common concerns, and the relative values assigned to these features and others motivate database design.

I always wanted to ship a write-only database. Lightning fast.

This is analogous to an elevator that’s unidirectional

It's amusing to me that this is really quite a pedantic observation yet it's driving very earnest engagement from hackernews. Myself included. Absolutely nothing in this article is riding on if its 1 or 2 problems - it's an aside at best. Yet I'm still trying to think through if it's 1 or 2. I mean, the "and" is right there - that clearly suggests two. It's almost comical even, to say "Here is one problem: X and Y." Yet in another way it seems like 2 sides of the same coin.

I guess there is a rather fine line between philosophy and pedantry.

Maybe we can think about it from another angle. If they are 2 problems databases were designed to solve, then that means this is a problem databases were designed to solve: storing data persistently.

Is that really a problem database were designed to solve? Not really. We had that long before databases. It was already solved. It's a pretty fundamental computer operation. Isn't it fair to say this is one thing? "Storing data so it can be retrieved efficiently."

You're thinking of regex

It is a single problem that contains two smaller problems, but the actual hard part (a third problem, if you wish) is putting them together. If you limit yourself to solve those two problems independently you won't have a (useful) database.

Off by 1 error is indeed a hard problem.

> Isn't that two problems?

No, that would be regexes.

You can decompose in 2 problems, because well is better, but is in fact one. Can be argued that is only this single problem:

How, in ACID way, store data that will be efficiently look it up later by a unknown number of clients and unknown access patterns, concurrently, without blocking all the participants, in a fast way?

And then add SQL (ouch!)

/dev/null is persistent across restarts and cache friendly, so it's got you covered.

my only minor critique is using lorem ipsum examples. It tends to make me want to gloss over instead of reading; I prefer seeing realistic data. other than that, it's a really cool post

I was tempted to knee-jerk dismiss this as "don't write your own database, don't even use a KV database, just use SQL". And then I remembered the only reason I'd say this is because I went through designing my own DB or using KV databases just to avoid SQL...only to realise i was badly reinventing SQL. It could be worth the lesson.

I think a lot of databases would disagree

I remember an article here, maybe a year ago, where somebody showed some database concepts from bash examples (like "write your db in bash"), but I can't find it anywhere, does anybody have it ?

Needs a faster database

I don't disagree with your take in general, but I do think it's different reading about minutiae than being invested in it. If you actually are curing these requirements it's probably quite engaging. If not, the eyes and mind start to gloss over them.

As a different example: I'm moving this week. I've known I'm moving for a while. Thinking about moving -- and all the little things I have to do -- is way more painful than doing them. Thinking about them keeps me up at night, getting through my list today is only fractionally painful.

I'm also leveling up a few aspects of my "way of living" in the midst of all this, and it'd be terribly boring to tell others about it, but when next Monday comes.. it'll be quite sweet indeed.

Have you considered if you have ADHD?

Thanks, we've added this to the thread's top text.