BrainBlog for JUXT by Jason Bloomberg
Create, read, update, and delete – the four central database operations we lovingly refer to as CRUD – have represented the central paradigm for interacting with databases since databases were invented in the middle of the last century. These operations found their way into SQL as INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE.
CRUD has been so engrained in the way we think about database interactions that it’s hard to imagine life without it. It’s quite a shock, therefore, that CRUD is fatally flawed.
The problem is with the update and delete operations as they both destroy data. Delete explicitly deletes data from the database, while update replaces the values in one or more records with new values – thus deleting any record of the old values.
Why is such destruction so problematic? What have organizations done over the years to address the problem? And perhaps most importantly, what should you do now?
