4 ms·
Yea, I've never really understood the portability argument. How often do people switch between sql dbs?
by woah 12y ago
Yea, I've never really understood the portability argument. How often do people switch between sql dbs?
- tl 12y agoOne of the advantages is the ability to run a different database during local development / testing from your production systems (say H2 locally vs. DB2 running in production). Personally, I view this to be an anti-pattern, but some people have to work with systems like this.
- calpaterson 12y agoYes, this is a very bad idea. Due to the way that query planners work, it's not even a good idea to vary the shape of the dataset between testing and production. If you have a different (bigger, higher stddev, etc) distribution of data in column x, the planner will often complete a query differently
- ams6110 12y agoAgree, unless your need for a DB is quite trivial, then perhaps something like SQLLite for the devs and whatever else for production. However this breaks down quickly once you grow beyond needing very simple INSERT and SELECT type operations.
- sitkack 12y agoAt which point one should just run SQLite everywhere, It is often excellent for datasets up to about a gig.
- PaulHoule 12y agoIt is pretty common that organization X uses a pastiche of different tools for a complicated set of reasons (the most senior of which is that it has grown through acquisition.) Often organization X has a large number of small applications and often big applications contain many small applications. Certainly some libraries and tools that work with different databases can make life easier in this case.
- mathgeek 12y agoIt usually refers to portability for multiple deployments. I.e. your fist client runs MSSQL, your second client runs Postgre, and then your next client runs MySQL. Very important in the enterprise, education, etc.
- sitkack 12y agoBack in the dawn of time, customers bought big machines to run all the databases for an organization. So software sold into those orgs needed to support Oracle or MSSQL. Now with machines being much faster and whole app stacks being virtualized the impetus for having an application support multiple databases is greatly reduced.
- spacemanmatt 12y agoAt my first major PostgreSQL job, I got there shortly after they had abandoned MySQL. So there's that.