Just to take this seriously, if only for a brief moment, here is the
proposition in a nutshell:
"The responsibility of ensuring data integrity falls entirely to the
application."
Two points:
First, this is the way things were before databases began to be used. If
you go back to the 1960s, you'll find that nearly all applications were
written exactly this way. It was the bug prone nature of this way of doing
things that led to the rise of databases to begin with. My choice of the
1960s is arbitrary. In different local environments, the transition to
databases happened much later, or never at all.
Second, note that "the application" is singular. This way of doing business
applies only when a database is embedded within a single application. If a
database is an information nexus allowing multiple applications to provide
and use shared information, the contracts between applications get drawn
into the nexus itself. The author makes much of the supposed superior
scalability of key/value data structures, but there is one way in which
they scale very poorly: the transition from embedded in a single
application to operating as a nexus between multiple applications.
I guess I should acknowledge that majority of today's new databases are of
the embedded type rather than of the nexus type. That means we fight most
of the battles on the other side's turf. Maybe that provides an insight
into how the keepers of the flame can survive the dark ages. I dunno.
