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 which you can query using a language that looks a bit like SQL.
It’s nice to see that MySQL is finally getting these features because it still seems the be the default database that is offered with a lot of web hosting packages and it would be good to have these features available to everyone.
Of course it’ll still be a couple of years before many hosting companies start using this version. Many of them are still using version 3.23.from 2003.
And then there’s the whole problem of persuading programmers who are used to MySQL into using these features.
Isn’t it up to the programmer’s programming language/tool to make use of these new features in some sort of data abstraction layer (not sure of the terminology)?
I think it’s passe nowadays to code SQL directly.
Kai,
I agree that programmers should be using some kind of data abstraction layer. However, I suspect that the number of programmers using something like that is small compared to the total number of people writing programs that use databases (particularly when you include all of the little web apps written in languages like PHP).
Also, I think that some of these data abstraction tools aren’t using as many database features as they could – and that’s at least partly because the most common database that they support (MySQL) didn’t include them until recently.