Ideas on Databases, Logic, and Language by Jeff Davis
When are you developing an application, and when are you developing a platform? A lot of discussion about programming comes down to this question; and the less-helpful discussions can usually be traced to confusion over this point. For instance, an article … Continue reading →
Do object-relational mappers (ORMs) really improve application development? When I started developing web applications, I used perl. Not even all of perl, mostly just a bunch of “if” statements and an occasional loop that happened to be valid perl (aside: … Continue reading →
Haskell is a very interesting language, and shows up on sites like http://programming.reddit.com frequently. It’s somewhat mind-bending, but very powerful and has some great theoretical advantages over other languages. I have been learning it on and off for some time, … Continue reading →
Let’s say you’re operating a zoo, and you have this simple constraint: You can put many animals of the same type into a single cage; or distribute them among many cages; but you cannot mix animals of different types within … Continue reading →
I saw a recent post Avoid Smart Logic for Conditional WHERE Clauses which actually recommended, “the best solution is to build the SQL statement dynamically—only with the required filters and bind parameters”. Ordinarily I appreciate that author’s posts, but this time I … Continue reading →
This is a counterpoint to Josh’s recent post: Why PostgreSQL Doesn’t Have Query Hints. I don’t really disagree, except that I think that there are many different definitions of “hints” floating around, leading to a lot of confusion. I could … Continue reading →
Joshua Drake’s recent article makes some interesting points, but there’s one thing in particular I find missing among many of these discussions. From the article: It appeared they felt we should be impressed that Facebook runs on MySQL not PostgreSQL. … Continue reading →
Say you are writing an online reservation system. The first requirement you’ll encounter is that no two reservations may overlap (i.e. no schedule conflicts). But how do you prevent that? It’s worth thinking about your solution carefully. My claim is … Continue reading →
On Monday, May 10th I will be joining Aster Data. I am very excited to work on some ambitious new projects there. Aster is a heavy user of PostgreSQL, so I will (of course) continue to actively participate in the … Continue reading →
First, what is a “flexible schema”? It’s hard to pin down an exact definition, but it’s used to mean a data model that permits changes in application data structures without needing to migrate old data or incur other administrative hassles. … Continue reading →