aaron's magical database tricks [ was Bath.pm April 2 Meeting Report]

[Colin M Strickland]

Aaron Trevena writes:
 > My plan is to use an abstraction layer for 95% of the work (which it
 > should do well 95% of the time) and then hack the remaining 5% using
 > something else but still asbtracted. Using non-standard code to solve
 > non-standard problems seems entirely reasonable.

It all sounds great. Abstracting all of the SQL away from the
application layer is definitely the best approach(thank the Lord for
DBI too). If only I could break my stored procedure habit. But at
least postgresql lets me write them in perl. And postgresql 7.2.x has
"untrusted" perl as a server side language now [1], which means you
can use modules, hurray !

 > The best bit is that most of web development and content management etc
 > uses only a very limited set of DB logic. And the bits that aren't within
 > that subset are the interesting bits you want to spend your time on :)
 > 
I often think that a lot of web based projects don't really need an
RDBMS, which is probably why so many of them use MySQL for the purpose
:-P . But you're quite right, its a tightly defined domain. Most (all)
of my database nightmares have come from situations where a single
giant DBMS is used to back multiple different applications, all of
which then amusingly fight against each other , in a manner oddly
reminiscent of "Robot Wars".

[1] http://www3.uk.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/7.2/postgres/plperl.html

-- 
Regards,
Colin M Strickland -- "Tape My Beatworm!"