Re: [sds-wg] Reminder and Agenda for Confidential Storage Spec Call - Feb 25 2021

On 2/27/21 8:55 PM, Chris Were wrote:
> I could break down the list we have discussed over the past few weeks and 
> point to the relevant section of CouchDB documentation that addresses those
> requirements.

Yes, this is a next step. Ideally, we'd map every feature in the spec today to
CouchDB documentation. Chris, it would be good for you to volunteer to do this
since you seem to be the one most driven to demonstrate that this is true.
It's something we're going to have to document in time anyway, to demonstrate
why the work needs to be done (or that W3C shouldn't waste their time on it
because... CouchDB exists).

Once you document it (not just the list of requirements we've been going over
during the last month, but all the features in the existing spec as well), we
can review it as a group to see if there is consensus.

Zooming out a bit to look at the big picture... thinking about how SQL was
standardized may help. SQL was first standardized by ANSI in 1986... but there
were databases on the market for years that had the "relational database"
feature set... relational databases existed in 1970, 16 years before the
/first/ standard existed. SQL has been standardized ever since.. with the most
recent version being SQL:2019. That's 35 *years* of standardization! Why are
we still standardizing it!?

To replay your point back to you, but in a different context:

MariaDB (a popular open source relational database) covers many of the common
use case needs for relational databases... so why do we need an SQL standard?

With that in mind, some thoughts on the questions you asked:

> This process feels like attempting to reinvent the wheel and produce a 
> sub-par outcome.

It always feels like that at first... like you're rubbing two sticks together
to create a fire when we already have nuclear power plants. Why don't we just
build a nuclear power plant? (Answer: there is no single specification on how
you build one and some of the skills are so specialized that it's out of the
reach of 99.99% of the population, which is not a good number if you're trying
to document and teach people how to do something).

The process of standards are not to innovate (at least, not primarily). It's
to look at everything that's out there and try to standardize the simplest set
of technologies that fit a Pareto distribution... that is, what 20% of
features meet 80% of the use cases. The goal isn't to get the standard to
support 100% of all use cases.

> I understand CouchDB is not a specification, but as an implementation it's 
> pretty darn close to what we're looking for.

I have a vague concept of what your requirements are, Chris. :) I'm sure you
don't have a solid concept of what Digital Bazaar's requirements are...
or Transmute's... or SecureKey's... or Microsoft's... or Michael's. We're just
scratching the surface, these discussions take a LOOOONG time to get to a
basic understanding on everyone's *public* use cases.

... but the way we get there is to talk about it, and documentation of the
sort you're talking about is vital to that process.

Thoughts?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
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Received on Sunday, 28 February 2021 15:24:16 UTC