alt Hacker NewsThis is somewhat related:
I mention this a lot, but in researching Data-Oriented Design (what Mike was talking about), I came across Richard Fabian's DoD book [1] which talks a lot about database normalization and the like. I found that odd, because the low-level high-performance game code he was talking about certainly wasn't going to marshal data into a DB to run SQL queries on it.
It turns out the relational model has a lot of advantages though. Programmers use trees all the time, in OO, in structs containing structs, in objects pointing to other objects. It's easy to forget that trees are just a special case of graphs (ie. networks), and that there are many ways to represent networks that don't rely on encoding a tree structure directly.
So, I've been doing what Richard Fabian suggested and I lay out my data (on paper) into tables, then attempt to normalize it and see the connections. I really like this way of designing things.
My big issue is that doing DB-like operations is hellish in most programming languages, and if you really want to try and marshal your data into a real DB (say, SQLite or DuckDB via a library), then you have a big messy translation layer where you're trying to match things to SQL types and you have giant SQL strings everywhere.
I see C# has LINQ, which is a query languages embedded in the language. I wonder if that approach is best, and why hasn't it been adopted more broadly? It seems like there's a lot for programming language designers to explore in this dimension, though I wonder if it even matters now with the superintelligence tidal wave.