vinalla vs nuts [LWN.net]

vinalla vs nuts

Posted Jul 11, 2006 19:41 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: vinalla vs nuts by ccyoung
Parent article: PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit a success (NewsForge)

In the sense that it makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible, I suppose that it is 'simple'.

(I'm not sure what to call most other RDBMSes, in that case: Neanderthal? Or is that offensive to Neanderthals, who were quite sophisticated really?)

AIUI, inheritance of constraints is implemented and will be in 8.2.

And personally I use extensible types all the time. They make SQL usable :)

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I sit corrected

Posted Jul 12, 2006 1:27 UTC (Wed) by ccyoung (subscriber, #16340) [Link]

I think you are much more of the student of SQL than myself (personally limited to PG, Oracle, MS-SQL, and MySQL). I and probably others would enjoy an overview of your assertions. Do you have anything in writing you can share?

Did not know that full table inheritance was taking place - this is really good news and I look forward to revisiting - have done many elaborate work-arounds.

I also sit corrected on extensibility: my point is that extending a single app among a dozen or so is, for me, asking for trouble.

Lastly, SQL is, after all, SQL. Every young Turk who sees it (of whom I have been one) decries is stodginess and oblique expressiveness. At this point in my professional career I'm (happily) too busy finishing projects to re meta-think SQL, although I'm still sensitive to inelegant code.

Also, most modern programming (Java, .Net) tends to demote the database to a simple repository, trying to capture the business rules in the middle tier with communication objects for example. SQL is a bad impedance match for this. Some of us (me) prefer use instead-of views for user interfaces and triggers to keep the database aligned. OK but not great.

Again, please share your enlightenment.