The database is the product
Why I stopped treating persistence as plumbing and started treating it as interface design.
For years I treated the database as plumbing — something behind the walls, invisible to users, only interesting when it broke.
I was wrong. The database is the product. The schema is the API. The queries are the user experience.
What changed
When I started designing schemas the way I design interfaces — with empathy for the person who’ll query them at 2am during an incident — everything got better. Naming improved. Relationships got cleaner. Migrations became less terrifying.
Your SELECT statement is a user interface. Treat it like one.