Comment by forgetfreeman
2 days ago
There's value in not having to hunt in several places for business logic, having it all in one language, etc. I was ambivalent on the topic until I encountered an 12 page query that contained a naive implementation of the knapsack problem. As with most things dogma comes with a whole host of issues, but in this case I think it's largely benign and likely did more good than harm.
> hunt in several places for business logic
But that is the result of having multiple applications needing to enforce valid states in the database.
"Business logic" is a loose term. The database is the effective store for state so it must enforce states, eg by views, triggers, and procedures.
Other "business logic" can happen outside of the db in different languages. When individual apps need to enforce valid states, then complexity, code, etc grows exponentially.
Other than a few ill-advised attempts to implement microservices infrastructure by well-intentioned co-workers I've not encountered situations where multiple applications needed to access a single data store. While I'm sure there are valid use cases there I suspect they're rare and should be treated like the outliers they are.
Did that 12 page query have any automated tests?
I doubt it was even under version control...
It was absolutely under version control and there was a full test suite. The guy that wrote it is easily in the top 3 smartest human beings I've ever met and an incredibly talented developer. Unfortunately a lot of his stuff required being at the same level on the IQ bell curve, which meant it was functionally unmaintainable by anyone else. If you're familiar with the Story of Mel, it was kinda like that.