On 18-Apr-07, at 5:20 PM, Vihan Pandey wrote:
Of course the statement ``writing huge amounts of extra code to do by myself what the rdbms is supposed to do" is quite extreme because of a simple reason - we do NEED databases and relational databases.
remember - i am a layman.
In fact legacy systems had faced many problems because everything was hardcoded and flat files(and nothing else) were the order of the day. This is where reading things for basic concepts makes a difference. In fact when i was studying databases in college there was a ton of database theory to be read, it REALLY annoyed me because i thought if i could write SQL i knew databases.
when i was in college, there wasnt much database theory. SQL had not been invented. I am talking from the point of view of the non-IT person who has been pulled into programming by the opportunities given by the open source world - and huge numbers of people like me have got screwed up by mysql
Also, i've learned one thing our database thinking MUST be product agnostic. As in - DFD's, ER-diagram's, and EER-diagram's have nothing to do with which DB/SQL you use. A join is a join(be it of any type) after you decide how it must happen, you refer to your DB product manual and figure it out :-)
product agnostic is fine - as long as you avoid a product that accepts 2007-2-30 into a date field in the database