Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
A more promising model, used in some systems, is to think of a database as an always-growing collection of immutable facts. You can query it at some point in time — but that’s still old, imperative style thinking. A more fruitful approach is to take the streams of facts as they come in, and functionally process them in real-time.
This talk introduces Apache Samza, a distributed stream processing framework developed at LinkedIn. At first it looks like yet another tool for computing real-time analytics, but really it’s a surreptitious attempt to take the database architecture we know, and turn it inside out.
After this talk, you'll see the architecture of your own applications in a completely new light.