Notes on "Immutability Changes Everything"
Published books are immutable. Accountants don't use erasers or they go to jail.
The paper Immutability Changes Everything by Pat Helland talks about the trend towards immutability in data storage thoughout all layers of the stack. From append-only apps (Record changes, then derive the current state), down to how bits are stored on a hard drive (e.g. Copy on Write).
I stumbled upon this paper through the Papers We Love collection. I was specifically looking for a paper that's short and easy to comprehend, since I don't have much experience in reading scientific papers. This is absolutely both short and easy to comprehend. If you're a beginner like me, I can highly recommend this one to you.
Key takeaways:
- Immutability enables clean replication
- Change logs (e.g. write-ahead logs) are the source of truth. The database is a cache of a subset of those change logs
- It's okay to consider violating normalization rules to trade storage cost for read speed
- Modern SSDs minimize wear by storing new versions of data to other blocks instead of mutating the data in place
- The cost of immutability is increased storage
This is post 098 of #100DaysToOffload.