On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
I guess I was being a bit flippant. Sorry for that. However, I stand by what I said earlier that there is no good reason to develop web apps which are not portable across databases.
Hmm, you must like writing lots of extra application code, and doing lots of work outside your database engine where (can be) much less efficient. Portability is nice no doubt, especially for simple or trivial apps as you want your customers to be able to run their db engine of choice.
But ...You must counter balance that with the fact that for more advanced applications where stored procedures, triggers, views, transactions, and other custom features your RDBMS engine can provide (that are NOT standard across all engines) that might make your app far more efficient would go unused as you re-implement the wheel (almost always with more verbose code that runs far slower and makes far more round trips between the app and the db).
I'm not saying portability is not a good goal. It is, but its not always the most important consideration. And as your apps get bigger I'd say it decreases in importance.
Just my 2 cents.