Re: Universal database interface?

From: Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:11:41 -0700
Message-ID: <bf463805041217112713b327@mail.gmail.com>

On 4/12/05, Jonathan Gennick <jonathan_at_gennick.com> wrote:Here's an interesting proposition:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub
>
> /a/network/2005/04/11/rsdp.html
>

Some initial thoughts.

He addresses many of the issues in the article, and then attempts to rationalize them:

"Many developers are happy to trade runtime performance for cross-platform portability."

Maybe the developers are happy, because performance is the DBA's problem, right?

"One of the reviewers pointed out that XML-RPC is not a good way to deliver BLOBs. I was not thinking of BLOBs when I wrote this article (my habit has always been to use databases to point to other resources, and to store large files somewhere else). However, it will be possible to send them using Base64 encoding. It's not very efficient, but it will work. If you need to support BLOBs, RSDP may not be a very good way to do this."

He may favor the practice of retrieving files from the filesystem, but it seems
to me he is ignoring that this is much like his complaint with databases requiring
different access methods.

Which OS? Which file system?

Good practice would dictate putting these in the database.

All the data is transported via xml. Better put in those better faster NIC's.

I can understand his pain in this matter, but I'm not sure this is the right

way to go about mitigating it. No, I don't have a better idea. :)

-- 
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Received on Tue Apr 12 2005 - 20:52:54 CDT