In a relational database, foreign keys are normally used to associate records stored in different tables, but wouldn’t it be nice to define relationships dynamically without having to add extra columns or tables? And while we’re at it, how about having sparse relationships by associating a record directly with any other record like “post X was last edited by user #123” or “post X was flagged for review by user #456” (who happens to be a moderator)?

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Over the years I’ve seen all sorts of SQL mistakes made by developers on my teams, and I’ve made quite a few of them myself. I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you, starting with security first…

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First a little context: At Faradai we had been using PostgreSQL on the ext4 file system for a number of years until it recently became evident that the constantly growing database size (over 5 TB at the time) would start to cause issues in general performance, cloud costs, and the ability to have reliable backups. We reviewed a number of alternative file systems, and chose ZFS mainly for its following three features…

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