4 ms·

I'm not sure if this is useful at any capacity. Sorry to be hard on that.

topspin 5y ago
There is good and bad. You're giving up conventional text based version control (assuming the 'database' behind this is anything like a conventional RDBMS database.) You could pick up a lot of flexibility; multiple, high feature frontends using anything that can deal with a relational schema, for example. Automation could benefit from the (loosely) standards based API that is SQL. I think it's worth exploring. I suspect that if it had been done this way on day one people would be suspect of any approach that looks like the hodgepodge of bespoke cloud APIs we wade through today. I've been working with OCI lately. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure if that still needs to be called out. Ironic that the company that popularized RDBMS software didn't invent this. They've got a really nice, first class fully supported Terraform provider, but apparently it didn't occur to anyone at Oracle that they might use their raison d'être to solve the problem. They could have done both even; the Terraform provider could be a front end for SQL DQL/DML operations. The iasql blog makes the rather good point that behind all the kooky Cloud APIs and their vast walls of documentation and third party abstractions everything you're doing is actually landing in a SQL database anyhow. What, exactly, is the value of all that stuff in the middle? There isn't enough info on the iasql site to illuminate this, but I think one problem they'll have is with types. There are a lot of special types in the world of cloud provisioning and if they try to shoehorn all those types into varchar, number and uuid the result will not be pleasing. Obvious examples would be IP addresses or CIDR notation.
- nathanwallace 5y ago
  I mentioned Steampipe [1] above, it has an open source OCI plugin [1] to query resources (no support for write operations). It's a Postgres FDW under the hood, and uses subset of Postgres types (bool, bigint, double, text, inet, cidr, timestamptz and jsonb) along with their standard operators. This approach has proven very simple and effective for us. 1 - https://steampipe.io https://steampipe.io 2 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-oci https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-oci

There is good and bad. You're giving up conventional text based version control (assuming the 'database' behind this is anything like a conventional RDBMS database.) You could pick up a lot of flexibility; multiple, high feature frontends using anything that can deal with a relational schema, for example. Automation could benefit from the (loosely) standards based API that is SQL. I think it's worth exploring. I suspect that if it had been done this way on day one people would be suspect of any approach that looks like the hodgepodge of bespoke cloud APIs we wade through today. I've been working with OCI lately. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure if that still needs to be called out. Ironic that the company that popularized RDBMS software didn't invent this. They've got a really nice, first class fully supported Terraform provider, but apparently it didn't occur to anyone at Oracle that they might use their raison d'être to solve the problem. They could have done both even; the Terraform provider could be a front end for SQL DQL/DML operations. The iasql blog makes the rather good point that behind all the kooky Cloud APIs and their vast walls of documentation and third party abstractions everything you're doing is actually landing in a SQL database anyhow. What, exactly, is the value of all that stuff in the middle? There isn't enough info on the iasql site to illuminate this, but I think one problem they'll have is with types. There are a lot of special types in the world of cloud provisioning and if they try to shoehorn all those types into varchar, number and uuid the result will not be pleasing. Obvious examples would be IP addresses or CIDR notation.

nathanwallace 5y ago
I mentioned Steampipe [1] above, it has an open source OCI plugin [1] to query resources (no support for write operations). It's a Postgres FDW under the hood, and uses subset of Postgres types (bool, bigint, double, text, inet, cidr, timestamptz and jsonb) along with their standard operators. This approach has proven very simple and effective for us. 1 - https://steampipe.io https://steampipe.io 2 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-oci https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-oci