Thursday, March 8, 2007
Ode to Laziness
Okay, so I've been going on and on and on about all the new kinds of laziness I've discovered. I'm using a full stack framework, I'm not making anything configurable, I'm not making anything portable.
Damn, this is going fast. Over half my tests are already passing.
And I'm having some fun.
This afternoon's rant is about databases, and all the things they can do, but don't do when developers rely on the least common denominator.
Foreign keys are great. I'm using them in Testy, and they're doing exactly what they're supposed to: protecting referential integrity. If you're writing an application to use "any" database, you can't rely on foreign keys working like you'd think they should. But if you're writing it for your own database, you know how they work.
The same goes for NOT NULL and PRIMARY KEY. The former can be used to ensure variables have values before being stored, and the latter can be used to ensure uniqueness.
Why not use the database for what it's good for?
Maybe part of the problem is the proliferation of Object Relational Models and other database interfaces that try to generalize the interfact to the database across all drivers. Maybe the problem is that developers are so used to handling everything in the application layer that they've forgotten what a database is good for.
As for me, and my house, we will use MySQL 5.x, and use the hell out of it.
Because we're lazy that way.
Damn, this is going fast. Over half my tests are already passing.
And I'm having some fun.
This afternoon's rant is about databases, and all the things they can do, but don't do when developers rely on the least common denominator.
Foreign keys are great. I'm using them in Testy, and they're doing exactly what they're supposed to: protecting referential integrity. If you're writing an application to use "any" database, you can't rely on foreign keys working like you'd think they should. But if you're writing it for your own database, you know how they work.
The same goes for NOT NULL and PRIMARY KEY. The former can be used to ensure variables have values before being stored, and the latter can be used to ensure uniqueness.
Why not use the database for what it's good for?
Maybe part of the problem is the proliferation of Object Relational Models and other database interfaces that try to generalize the interfact to the database across all drivers. Maybe the problem is that developers are so used to handling everything in the application layer that they've forgotten what a database is good for.
As for me, and my house, we will use MySQL 5.x, and use the hell out of it.
Because we're lazy that way.
// posted by David @ 3:39 PM 
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