On Thu, February 5, 2009 9:38 am, Lawrence Sica wrote: > > On Feb 5, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Patrick Coskren wrote: > >> On Feb 5, 2009, at 12:21 PM, Lawrence Sica wrote: >> >>> MySQL is, to be frank, shittastic. I never understood >>> the joy and awesomeness that some people think that it is made up of. >> >> Short learning curve and very quick for tasks with high-frequency >> reads, low-frequency writes, and no strong need for data integrity. >> > > That short learning curve is part of the problem. You have people > managing databases with no actual understanding of what that means as > a result. Not that something needs to be hard, but it needs to not be > too simple.
Well, I'm not sure if you mean me.. I'll readily admit I'm not a DBA. But I deal in data, and have built a number of database-backed applications over the years - typically internal applications, supporting production environments and clients. I know my limits, and in my current environment I'm happy to have far more skilled people than I am to do the real hard work. But in between, there's a set of needs - for instance, right now I'm working on cleaning up a complete wreck of a database - the schema was clearly designed by a committee of unstable, sadistic morons (a commercial product, not one of ours). The data itself is a disaster of epic proportions. I've got to simultaneously clean up live data - normalizing columns with often 5 or 6 completely different types of data stored within - maintain existing schema and data, and prepare for a migration to a sane application. And I'm uniquely in a position to do this, as I have the best sense for the data as it is, and as it should be. I'd love not to be touching the database at all, but I don't know of any reasonable alternatives. So, I'm here bitching about the relatively steep approach SQL Server requires for what are otherwise undemanding needs - I have a good grasp of SQL fundamentals, and am not trying to be an architect, just a technical business user. Also, I'm reminded frequently that SQL wasn't intended just for DBAs - it was meant as a general purpose query language for people like me... and I tend to have no problem with the language itself, with grokking complex databases. It's just the tools that occasionally get in the way. > >> There are tasks for which that's a good set of tradeoffs. That >> describes what a lot of web developers think they need. (I believe a >> lot of web developers underestimate their need for data integrity >> until it bites them in the ass.) > > I've found not just web developers underestimate this. It does amaze > me how data-centric the web is and how much people seem to not really > think about the value of it. > > --Larry > _______________________________________________ > OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] > http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters > List hosted at http://cat5.org/ > _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
