Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, September 10, 2026
Joe Hellerstein explains that databases chose sets as their fundamental model, allowing for portable queries regardless of output order. He acknowledges that while this approach simplifies many problems, he has also explored how to accommodate sequentiality in distributed systems without requiring developers to manage low-level details.
“I'd say, well, databases very wisely chose sets as their fundamental model.”
“So, a table, database tables are a set of rows. The ordering is not dictated.”
“And I applied my own medicine, which is, no, let's stare at this thing harder and say, well, okay, so quentiality sometimes matters. How are we going to accommodate it in a way that doesn't require all this careful single machine at a time reasoning.”