On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 08:13:58AM -0400, C. Jon Larsen wrote: > > 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. > I am not a fan of writing extra code. However, I am willing to do some work to get portability when it is possible. > 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). > You make a good point about advanced applications, but wouldn't you rather use a database that didn't take 10 years of being criticized to implement those features (which are arguably staples of any RDBMS)? > 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. > Portability may decrease in importance as the size of the project grows, but I would argue that it should *increase* in importance. My rationale is this: small projects can be easily ported to another platform, but as the project grows bigger it becomes more difficult to port after the fact. I know that many people are scared about Oracle's acquisition of Innobase and Sleepycat and what that means for the future of MySQL. Now, I don't think that this will end up making MySQL non-free tomorrow, but I would hate to be stuck in a situation like that if it were to occur. Look at how many people would like to move to anything other than Windows, but they are tied down by non-portable proprietary software. I'm just saying that we know better and yet we still conciously make bad choices. I know that you pointed out that complex apps may benefit greatly from making use of custom features or features in one particular database. However, I think that those are by far the exception. > Just my 2 cents. > I'll see your 2 cents and raise you 2 cents. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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