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Within modern software development practices, you are expected to build software from a two- or three-sentence business feature. The name of the game is to not go too deep and to constantly iterate. This is far different from the traditional waterfall method, where you would spend six months figuring out the requirements analysis before you wrote a single line of code. With a waterfall approach, this is fine because you will know the end state in order to create your database objects. However, you simply can’t do this if you’re following agile methods because there is no way to build a data model from a three-sentence business requirement, and you’re constantly having to rework your database. //
RDBMS Growth at Travelers
YEAR Tables in production
2013 40
2015 70
2017 100
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We taught every team how to data model in JSON, as opposed to the rigid tables and rows of a relational database. This was an eye-opening experience for many people, who now understood how this affected the speed at which our teams could deliver software into production. //
At the end of the day, if you’re doing it right in relational, you have a lot of tables, and if you’re modeling your data properly, you will have a lot of objects even for the simplest use cases. Once we determined that our database was slowing us down, we knew it was time for a change.