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> It depends on the problem domain you are working in. Unix is a pretty general purpose thing. And yet, you won't find anything in it that needs a database, no
by sklogic 12y ago
> It depends on the problem domain you are working in.
Unix is a pretty general purpose thing. And yet, you won't find anything in it that needs a database, nothing at all among hundreds of applications, including some fairly complex ones, like CAD/CAE tools, IDEs, compilers, etc.
> I can't think of an application I've done where this wouldn't have required complex serialization and parsing.
Are you doing CRUD mostly?
> Those tools are already built for me in the form of ORMs and RDMSes. Why should I write my own?
Parsing?!? In ORMs and DBMSes?!? C'mon, try to parse me some C++ with your Oracle.
- SamReidHughes 12y ago> Parsing?!? In ORMs and DBMSes?!? Yes. Stuff stored in files has to be parsed when you read it out of files.
- sklogic 12y agoAnd how exactly RDBMS crap could help with parsing? Mind parsing a C++ source file with your RDBMS?
- SamReidHughes 12y agoThe grandparent was talking about the serialization and parsing of the data that you'd be storing in flat files, not parsing of C++ files. Work that you avoid by using a DBMS.
- sklogic 12y agoParsing text files is not a problem at all. Never been a problem. And there are far too many benefits of having flat text streams vs. some inaccessible stupid binary ad hoc formats hidden inside some enterprisey RDBMS guts.
- duaneb 12y ago> Unix is a pretty general purpose thing. Yea, until you want to query a normalized data set. Then unix is pretty miserable, because text is very ill-suited for indices and rapid and/or random access.
- sklogic 12y agoTurns out, you need to do such things pretty rarely. Not "most of the time", as RDMBS proponents claim.
- superuser2 12y ago>Parsing?!? In ORMs and DBMSes?!? What exactly do you think a database does? Provides a way to durably store tabular data on disk and read it back. Without a database, I have to make that myself by writing serialization routines to put my data structures on disk and parsing routines to go from "stream of characters" to my data structures. DMBS places some limits on your data structures but does all that for you.
- sklogic 12y agoIf serialisation is hard for you, then you probably doing something badly wrong. In the tools I'm using it's done by a single line of code. And since most of the time data structures are trees or graphs, being sledgehammered into a tabular structure is not pleasant at all.