This is going to be so short, it requires this sentence to say so so it appears a bit longer.

It seems that there are two ways of looking at them. Prescriptive: “When faced with a problem of class X, use pattern A”. Or descriptive, “When faced with a problem of class X, a lot of times engineers use approaches Alpha, Beta, Gamma that have a particular pattern in common; let’s extract it and call it A so we have a common terminology.”

The “prescriptive” part really should be a “strong suggestion” added weight to by the fact that it is widespread enough to get a name, but nothing beyond that. (See also “Thinking outside the box“).

What prompted this? Well, TIL that exercises such as Ad hoc querying on AWS have a name: “lakehouse“, and that I’ve apparently been thinking about how best to do “Reverse ETL” without thinking “Reverse ETL”. Well, I guess that’s open source marketing.

This post is not making any prescriptions.