When I first read about Drizzle last week I assumed it was some kind of joke. It turns out that it isn’t, so it just makes me a little depressed. Drizzle is[1] a cut-down version of MySQL. MySQL is the database server than has been known to make grown database designers cry because of its… Continue reading Drizzle
Tag: database
Oops
I had a little bit of an accident over the weekend when I accidentally started to restore an old back-up of the database that runs this blog. I noticed what I what I was doing pretty quickly and stopped it before too much damage was done. But I lost the last few days entries and… Continue reading Oops
Blog Progress
The hard disk that my old blog entries live on (along with a few other web sites) is still looking rather ill. It’s apparently possible to prod it in a certain manner and get it to work for a few hours until it gets tired again. The hard part is persuading the tech support people… Continue reading Blog Progress
Advanced Databases for Beginners
I have a new three hour tutorial called Advanced Databases for Beginners. There were two main reasons why I thought it would be useful to write it. I keep coming across databases that were designed by “professionals” who obviously have no idea about good database design practices I keep reading articles by the authors of… Continue reading Advanced Databases for Beginners
What’s Wrong With ORM
Last night I gave a talk to the London Perl Mongers about “What’s Wrong With ORM”. It was a first draft of a talk that I hope to be giving a few times this year. There’s also an article in preparation (well, I say “in preparation” but I actually mean “slowly coalescing in my brain”).… Continue reading What’s Wrong With ORM
MySQL 5
Earlier today I was at an internal company presentation about MySQL 5. There seemed to be a lot of fuss made about new features like stored procedures, triggers and views. Features that I was using in Sybase in 1992. Without features like these you don’t have a database – you just have a few datafiles… Continue reading MySQL 5
Book Review: Database in Depth
I’ve written a review of Chris Date’s book Database in Depth. All in all I thought it was rather good – tho’ in places it reminded me a bit too much of some of my college higher maths lectures. I’ve got a bit behind on book reviews. I have a large pile of books here.… Continue reading Book Review: Database in Depth
ActiveRecord Does It Wrong
I’m listening to the keynotes on the final day of EuroOSCON and David Heinemeier Hansson is talking about the secrets of Ruby on Rails. He talks about how they promote “convention over configuration” and how that means that you don’t have to describe the same object attribute multiple times. This is a great idea, but… Continue reading ActiveRecord Does It Wrong
Databases and Metadata
Following on from my previous post let’s take a closer look at the kinds of metadata that you might put into a database and how an Object-Relational Mapping layer (like Class::DBI, ActiveRecord or Hibernate) might make use of it. We’ll start with the most obvious stuff and work our way down to less common features.… Continue reading Databases and Metadata
On Databases
Last week David Heinemeier Hansson wrote a rather controversial piece about the use of stored procedures, triggers and relational constraints in databases. Later in the week Alex Bunardzic backed him up. What they both seem to be saying is that because we now have powerful tools to represent our data models in code[1] then there… Continue reading On Databases