Subtitle: Why I Tried Storing Structured Data in Blobs and What Actually Happened
1. The Hook
Everyone tells you not to use Azure Bl...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
The concept is very similar to github.com/AutoMQ/automq
"Dumb idea or Underrated Trick?" could be the name of my memoir.
Haha that’s a perfect memoir title I’d totally read that😃
My power company (PECO) does something similar with their outage API. The API endpoints are just URLs of objects in S3 which are static JSON files. When they want to update outage data they just upload a new JSON file. It's dumb but it works, so I guess it's not that dumb. :-)
haha that’s awesome love real-world examples like that! Makes total sense though static JSON via S3 or Blob is super reliable and cheap.
What you are talking about is NoDB. I did a post about it a while ago.
And there are query engines for it.
Haha, looks like I accidentally reinvented your NoDB idea 😅 Just read your post, love how you broke down the query vs storage split. I was playing with Blob Storage as pure storage, but now I’m tempted to try it with a real query layer like you suggested.
It is not my idea. I discovered it because it was in the Lobsters feed.
Ah, makes sense! Either way, thanks for pointing me toward it the NoDB concept connects really well with what I was trying to do. Learned something new today 😄
Cool and unique article. I never really thought about using blog storage this way xd. Hypothetically, if you had to model relationships between records, how would you approach it?
Thanks! Yeah, it was a fun experiment 😄
For relationships I’d probably go with something simple like storing references by blob name or ID, kind of like foreign keys, but resolved in code. For example, a user.json could list post IDs, and the app fetches those blobs on demand or via a small index cache. Definitely not as nice as joins, but workable for small-scale or read-heavy scenarios.