New problems of deduplication

Programmers spend a lot of time fighting against duplication. Duplicated code is bad, other things equal, because it is inefficient, harder to maintain, harder to improve, much buggier, and much more confusing. Duplicated data is bad, other things equal, for many of the same reasons, but it's arguably even more confusing, because in practice it often takes the form of, e.g., a "master database table" with three different SKU columns that encode subtly different information. Not all duplication is bad: if your company is big enough, maybe it's OK if distant teams write the same helper functions. Maybe you really do, for whatever reason, need performance gains you can get by storing your data in several places (whether that's copying it across systems, materializing it in advance, pre-computing variations of it, or whatever). We do not, on average, spend enough time fighting against duplication, but the optimal amount of this kind of duplication is not zero. Whether or not you agree…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town