They are you. You is they. It’s one company with one goal — keep companying.
The idea that ever “department” should access every other department’s data through some bespoke interface that the latter department maintains might work at some corporate behemoth, but at almost all other scales is absurd.
This would be a total waste of effort when you need to be building a product and iterating. I hate articles like this because they do a poor job contextualizing the tradeoffs and when it might be appropriate to do the weird exceptional thing.
IMHO if you have a performance critical case when foreign keys are in the way, load THAT data into an in memory DB on a recurring basis and server time sensitive requests from there.
Foreign keys are slow on delete, not on read. If you have a popular table, say, users, and all other tables refer to it, then deleting a user locks the database for time proportional to the number of foreign keys - good old linear scaling.
It doesn't lock the database, it only locks the rows of the tables that have foreign keys to the popular tables and are referencing the user you are deleting.
Rightly so because when deleting the user the database needs to do work to keep the referential integrity. Either it nulls the user_id, delete the rows, or it throws an error.
I don’t know that this is a problem specifically of the US or higher education, just humans. Humans want to have the best, to be the best. There’s only so many “bests”. When competing with millions or billions of other people, the odds you are the best are very low indeed.
I think it was less painful pre-internet, pre-globalization, where you only had to be the best in your town, or your state, and that was pretty dang impressive. Now if you aren’t the best in the world what even are you?
Yes agreed - the internationalization of the college application process has changed everything. The other factor is that when you have such competitiveness, you start seeing a professionalization of the process - so admissions consultants, high-end tutoring.
The idea that ever “department” should access every other department’s data through some bespoke interface that the latter department maintains might work at some corporate behemoth, but at almost all other scales is absurd.