From the article;
David Heinemeier Hansson mentions how he had to “slaughter the holy cows” of computer science. He then goes on to explain how he and his partners in crime proceeded to do it: “We took a pretty radical stand: Stored procedures and all things that make your database clever are evil.” And he added: “If you tell a lot of IT shops that, they’ll be majorly offended, because that’s just the way they do things.”
My view? I dislike stored procedures. It puts application level problems and descriptions in the database. IMO database are supposed to be dumb storage, they are intended to manage the storing of data, not business logic.
Another from the article;
Firstly, every relational jockey will insist that data integrity basically means that each row in the table is uniquely identified. This integrity, then, ensures that there are no duplicate rows in a table. ... Typically, the RDBMS will enforce this rule of uniqueness by implementing a bailout concept known as the surrogate key. What that means is that, indeed, each row in the Patient table will be unique, thanks to the unique surrogate key. But all the other information in the rows of that table could be absolutely identical, while giving the false impression of ‘uniqueness’.
My view; But I love normalisation! It does have its limitations however, though this particular instance can be handled at the application or database level to enforce uniqueness on a field in a table.
Another from the article;
Another myth of data integrity is the so-called ‘orphanage prevention’. This special case of data integrity, known as referential integrity, has much more applicability in the non-electronic storage systems than in the electronic ones. The reason for that is the fact that electronic orphaned rows are fairly innocuous, since there is no simple and obvious way to traverse the collection in order to reach them. In real life, non-electronic systems, such records are much more likely to stumble upon.
This is an application level problem, but this just proves his point. Let database be dumb, and application smart, after all the application is a model of the business process, the database is just storage to support and expedite the data being pulled into business objects.
Interesting article. Usually the database stuff doesn't get much navel gazing.
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