Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database" - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Wed, May 04, 2016 11:05:25 AM Will McCormick wrote:

A reason to consider may be portability. What happens if I want to let my customer chose their data store or I just don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.Technically there are truths but you cannot ignore the business side either. If a we can exceed our performance requirements and keep things generic/portable this is the best of both worlds.I think this is the main reason people separate the business logic from the database. How many of you have ported databases between platforms? Or had multiple types of data stores in the same company?

I have been waiting for the portability argument for the last 20+ posts :-) Everyone who did any type of consulting/working in this field knows that latest the second argument from management is “portability”. I have yet to see anyone who really needed to move to a different database. If they did it usually is a political issue and not a technical one (uhh, we hired this new operations manager and MS SQL is so much better than postgresql …) Unless you develop a generic software to be sold to many clients, the choice of data storage is rarely a real concern unless someone who feels the urge to be important starts throwing words he read in a magazine at management. None of my clients ever questioned the database. They either had one which they wanted to use (i.e. they had a big iron IBM with DB2 on it plus a DBA who knew what he was doing) or they didn't care as long as it worked as expected and came with a maintenance contract of sorts.

If you're developing a web application, the least concern is portability (you're not going to replace the million lines of PHP either). The biggest concern should lie with data integrity and API's that protect your data and business logic so you can hire that cheap app development company from overseas your boss recommended (based on a spam email) without running the risk of compromising everything.

Uwe