Category: database
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Understanding Unfamiliar Databases
A user recently asked: What kind of approaches and techniques can you employ to become familiar with an existing database if you are tasked with supporting and/or modifying it? How can you easily and effectively ramp up your knowledge of a database you have never seen before? Here was my reply: The first thing I…
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Why Should You Use an ORM?
A user recently asked for good arguments in favor of using Object/Relational Mapping technology: If you were to motivate [sic] the “pro’s” of why you would use an ORM to management/client, what would the reasons be? Try and keep one reason per answer so that we can see what gets voted up as the best…
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The Next-Gen Databases
A user recently asked: I’m learning traditional Relational Databases (with PostgreSQL) and doing some research I’ve come across some new types of databases. CouchDB, Drizzle, and Scalaris to name a few, what is going to be the next database technologies to deal with? SQL is a language for querying and manipulating relational databases. SQL is…
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ActiveRecord does not suck
I’ve been reading a few blog postings such as Kore Nordmann’s ActiveRecord sucks and Mike Seth’s ActiveRecord sucks, but Kore Nordmann is wrong. ActiveRecord is fine. It is a tool that does just what it’s designed to do. What sucks is when developers try to make it do other things than what it’s intended to do. I…
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In Support of the Relational Model
Every few years, a wave of people claim that the relational model falls short of modeling data structures of modern applications. This includes some really smart people recently such as: – Jim Starkey– Brian Aker– MIT researchers This trend of criticizing the relational model started almost immediately after E. F. Codd published his seminal paper,…