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Often the data in a database can outlive the application it was initially designed for. Say you have a legacy application you want to rewrite.[1] If the data
by gerbilly 8y ago
Often the data in a database can outlive the application it was initially designed for.
Say you have a legacy application you want to rewrite.[1]
If the data is stored in an unstructured way, then the schema is in the code base of the legacy application, and will have to be reimplemented in the new application.[2]
However, if the schema is implemented by the database, then the application can be upgraded relatively easily.
[1] Or an example more suited to modern ears, say you just wrote an MVP and want to do a rewrite now that you have 50 customers on it.
[2] Often in a a bug for bug compatible manner.
- wvenable 8y agoI have an application written almost 20 years ago using unstructured storage (imagine a JSON blob but not JSON) and it still has code to handle the various schema changes that have happened over the years. The data itself is what would be considered unstructured; basically many dozens of different document types. This is why I chose to store it this way. However, in retrospect, it would have been much better for maintenance, performance, quality, and code-size to have created every document type as a separate strongly-typed table.