Wandering the halls of the Internet today, it's hard to miss a certain kind of discourse on data. Big data, bigger data, biggest data. A million rows aren't cool. You know what's cool? A billion rows. Distributed data systems that slip the surly bonds of any one machine. Techniques for sampling and transforming data while it moves. Strategies for contending with a deluge of events from chatty devices. Directing those data tributaries into undifferentiated data lakes so that we may pose different queries onto the data someday. It has become almost impossible to talk about this stuff without abusing metaphors way past their safe design limits.
As a developer, all those bits occupying the proverbial lake/warehouse/refinery are as immediately useful as a grape seed is to a winery. Locality of data isn't some abstract concept when you're trying to build things on top of that data — it's the leading term of developer experiences. If I have the data, I can load it, and get to work. If I don't have the data, then