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> I've seen many service layers and front ends change over the years, all while sitting on the same RDBMS This. And the youngsters never believe me, when I te

> I've seen many service layers and front ends change over the years, all while sitting on the same RDBMS This. And the youngsters never believe me, when I tell them that the application that they are writing is not the only one and will not be the last one to access the database.

halostatue 6y ago
My standard line for decades has been that the database is more important from the program. You can reconstruct how the program works from the database; you can’t reconstruct the database from how the program works. A business might be interrupted if their programs accessing the database break. A business will _die_ if their database is lost.
- mattbuilds 6y ago
  Reminds me of the Fred Brooks quote, "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." It always starts with the data.
- pmontra 6y ago
  I'm currently staring at a PostgreSQL database created by a Django app with a lot of inheritance between models. My favorite /s is the table with a single column containing the id of the record itself. It's basically impossible to start from the database and understand what's going on. It will be a huge pain to interface to this database from something else. On the other side, I'm maintaining another Django app for the same customer, with saner tables (no inheritance) and that's on par with other ORMs. My take is never use inheritance with Django.
  - touisteur 6y ago
    Never use inheritance at all? I was thinking you could reconstruct part of the app stack by observing and clustering the requests and transactions. But then some people think join is the devil and you'd be back to square one. In a perfect world every app would have only views over what they need and prepared requests. But then CI/CD and all kind of tests can become very painful...
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Django is just plain bad at data modeling there I said it
    - ttz 6y ago
      I don't know you, but I think we'd be great friends based solely on this statement.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        I don’t make friends as easily as hating on any technology but I do make friends easily on kindness. Hi! I learned a lot great and not great working with DRF. Kind of took it and ran with it on TypeScript and Node. Working on a much better HTTP interface for that platform.

halostatue 6y ago

My standard line for decades has been that the database is more important from the program. You can reconstruct how the program works from the database; you can’t reconstruct the database from how the program works. A business might be interrupted if their programs accessing the database break. A business will _die_ if their database is lost.

mattbuilds 6y ago
Reminds me of the Fred Brooks quote, "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." It always starts with the data.
pmontra 6y ago
I'm currently staring at a PostgreSQL database created by a Django app with a lot of inheritance between models. My favorite /s is the table with a single column containing the id of the record itself. It's basically impossible to start from the database and understand what's going on. It will be a huge pain to interface to this database from something else. On the other side, I'm maintaining another Django app for the same customer, with saner tables (no inheritance) and that's on par with other ORMs. My take is never use inheritance with Django.
- touisteur 6y ago
  Never use inheritance at all? I was thinking you could reconstruct part of the app stack by observing and clustering the requests and transactions. But then some people think join is the devil and you'd be back to square one. In a perfect world every app would have only views over what they need and prepared requests. But then CI/CD and all kind of tests can become very painful...
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Django is just plain bad at data modeling there I said it
  - ttz 6y ago
    I don't know you, but I think we'd be great friends based solely on this statement.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      I don’t make friends as easily as hating on any technology but I do make friends easily on kindness. Hi! I learned a lot great and not great working with DRF. Kind of took it and ran with it on TypeScript and Node. Working on a much better HTTP interface for that platform.