You gotta push if you wanna pull
Posted by ingve 7 days ago
Comments
Comment by idk_edwin 3 days ago
It's funny how "push vs pull" always sounds like a technical choice, yet it usually exposes the social wiring of a team more than anything else. When every system expects to be pulled from, you start to see who actually depends on whom, and where the real bottlenecks live. The post captures that quiet truth that architecture isn't just code, it's how people negotiate responsibility.
Comment by darth_avocado 3 days ago
The biggest driver for push vs pull in my experience is “who does the work”. If I need data and I have to ask 7 different teams to “push”, it ain’t happening.
Comment by cognomano 3 days ago
So… caches. The unfortunate reality of high used systems.
Comment by cwillu 3 days ago
Or indexes, which are after all a structured way of duplicating data for performance, sometimes so much so that they entirely replace the actual table row lookup.
Comment by gunnarmorling 3 days ago
Yepp, making exactly that same point in the post:
> This is why we have indexes in databases, which, if you squint a little, are just another kind of materialized view, at least in their covering form.
Comment by samdoesnothing 3 days ago
Yeah that was a lot of words to say caching is needed sometimes.
As always it's an engineering decision full of tradeoffs. You should never duplicate your data, except when you need to...etc etc.
Comment by tedyoung 3 days ago
Comment by mawadev 3 days ago
... and don't forget to flush!