This article would be way more useful if it named the offending drivers and linked to relevant github issues. As is this is just a set of useless curiosities.
I came in wanting to check if any of the drivers I use were affected by any of the bugs they found. No idea!
Understand the sentiment. On the flip side, and as noted in the post, we don't want it to serve as a "name and shame" situation. We have a lot of respect for the folks maintaining the drivers we use, they do a pretty hard job, and so we don't want to come out swinging and taking shots at them. So we're trying to walk that line.
We also think the information provided in the post is valuable as is: it's easy enough to check whether a driver you use faces any of the issues we mention.
With that said, here's a bit more color:
- the native Snowflake driver for GoLang does not implement COPY functionality (or at least it did not when we last tried to use it).
- the memory leaks are pretty prevalent across ODBC drivers. It's worth watching out for that one if you're using any ODBC driver.
- the breaking change on connection string was Databricks' GoLang driver.
- the DECIMAL one is pretty prevalent too. BigQuery only allows you to go up to DECIMAL(38,9) while most other drivers let you go to 18 on scale, and ClickHouse supports precision/scale of up to 76. Redshift complains loudly if you try to insert a DECIMAL(38,17) into a DECIMAL(38,18) column, for instance.
Agreed. Without actual references, this is marketing blather, not a technical article.
The worst part is that it doesn't have to be name and shame. Take the "epoch" discussion, for example. The fact that "epochs" differ in implementation is something that isn't even a bug--it's just different. That alone is likely surprising to a lot of people and would probably be worth an article.
Of course, the real issue is probably that "boring" databases just work and "exciting" databases are full of bugs. If you're a database SAAS startup, slagging the databases that everybody considers cool and hip isn't going to be good for your exit.
I came in wanting to check if any of the drivers I use were affected by any of the bugs they found. No idea!