The Homeopathic Database

A few friends and I were discussing databases the other day. A colleague of one of us had tried to persuade him that a memory-based DB would be ideal for their project because of the increased commit speed compared to a disk-based system. Data would be eventually written to disk "at some point". My friend pointed out that /dev/null was even faster for writes and only moderately less useful if you need a cast-iron guarantee that all committed data will be available in the future.

If, instead of writing to /dev/null, you write to /dev/zero, it has much the same effect on your data, but reading from /dev/zero produces an infinite stream of zeros. Immediately, we realised this was the answer to every database user's dreams – dilute your data in an infinite sea of zeros: the Homeopathic Database.

Think about it. All those ones interspersed with zeros you started out with may seem important, but the advantages are worth considering. First of all, we know from the countless randomised, double-blind trials done on all homeopathic medicine* that it's a very effective idea. The fact that you only get zeros out at the end is not important because they have absorbed information from all the ones that have been diluted in them. As we know from homeopathic practice, the more zeros we have to dilute the ones in, the more effective the mixture, so the infinite number of zeros in /dev/zero means that what is stored in the database will be really good data.

Secondly, something that all DBAs worry about, backups, are really easy because the data is particularly well suited to compression: although there's an infinite amount of data in /dev/zero, as it's completely predictable, it's infinitely compressible. Backups therefore take no time at all.

The one thing you must remember to do is invert all your data before writing it to the database: the "law of similars" means that retrieved data will have the opposite effect in homeopathic concentrations as it did originally. And you may have to hit your server with a leather cushion while transactions are being committed.

Thanks to Mark, Steve and Alistair.

*They do do that, don't they? I mean surely no one would let people just sell any old rubbish without proper scientific investigation into whether or not it was better than placebo, would they? People who market it are able to make such grand claims for it, it seems certain they have data from repeatable, peer-reviewed trials or they wouldn't hold such strong beliefs.