In defense of extreme database-centric architecture

Abstract

A famous aphorism in computer science goes: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection", often expanded by the humorous clause "except for the problem of too many levels of indirection". After 30 years of applying the first aphorism, multi-tier architectures (i.e. architectures with many levels of indirection) have become the de facto standard for web applications, leaving little room for alternative architectures. But in the industry, there is a product to develop and run web applications that follows a different architecture, centered on the RDBMS to the extreme of not needing any other component to function. There are not many papers in academia that addresses RDBMS-centric architectures in general, and this extreme architecture in particular has not been considered. In recent works I have analyzed the case of an extreme database-centric architecture, which I have called RDBMS-only architecture. This article defends the relevance and analyzes opportunity cases of this approach.