<story><title>Reddit’s database has two tables (2012)</title><url>https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>withinboredom</author><text>I worked at a startup (now fairly popular in the US) where we had tables for each thing (users, companies, etc) and a “relationship” table that described each relationship between things. There were no foreign keys, so making changes were pretty cheap. It was actually pretty ingenious (the two guys who came up with the schema went on to get paid to work on k8s).&lt;p&gt;It was super handy to simply query that table to debug things, since by merely looking for a user, you’d discover everything. If Mongo was more mature and scalable back then (2012ish), I wonder if we would have used it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vivegi</author><text>This is quite similar to the RDF triples model. Everything is a &amp;#x27;thing&amp;#x27; including &amp;#x27;relationships&amp;#x27; between things. So you just need a thing table and a relation table.&lt;p&gt;The issue with this is schema management and rules gets pushed to the application layer. You also need to deal with very massive tables (in terms of # of rows) for the relationships table which leads to potential performance issues.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reddit’s database has two tables (2012)</title><url>https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>withinboredom</author><text>I worked at a startup (now fairly popular in the US) where we had tables for each thing (users, companies, etc) and a “relationship” table that described each relationship between things. There were no foreign keys, so making changes were pretty cheap. It was actually pretty ingenious (the two guys who came up with the schema went on to get paid to work on k8s).&lt;p&gt;It was super handy to simply query that table to debug things, since by merely looking for a user, you’d discover everything. If Mongo was more mature and scalable back then (2012ish), I wonder if we would have used it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dehrmann</author><text>&amp;gt; tables for each thing (users, companies, etc) and a “relationship” table that described each relationship between things&lt;p&gt;Sounds like objects and associations in the Tao model:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.fb.com&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;core-data&amp;#x2F;tao-the-power-of-the-graph&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.fb.com&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;core-data&amp;#x2F;tao-the-powe...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>