Simon Willison’s Weblog

MySQL best practise

O’Reilly have a new article up entitled Ten MySQL Best Practises. Jeremy Zawodny has a few problems with the article, and Tony Bowden throws in some comments as well. There’s plenty of useful information distributed between the three viewpoints.

Posted 14th July 2002 at 7 pm

This is MySQL best practise by Simon Willison, posted on 14th July 2002.

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The problem is that these two guys are looking at the issue that you won't move from MySQL at all. period. From experience I know this isn't true - I've moved between MySQL and PostgreSQL (because I changed hosting companies, but also because I couldn't decide which was better!) and abstraction helped. Their point about using SQL92 as being limiting is good, as this really stunts what I can do in applications I write - and yet I don't want to write MySQL only applications, because there is a market for apps running on other databases (and I've been in the situation of needing them). I'm beginning to think that the only way to get round the problem is to keep a separate file full of queries and have a different one for each database. That way you'd have SQL abstraction as well as datbase API abstraction. Of course, this would only be useful if you knew how to write SQL for all 9 databases, which I don't so I guess I'll have to stick with imperfect abstraction/emulation layers... Enough rambling :-)
Peter - 22nd July 2002 07:57 - #

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