Re: RI - pros and cons

Don Smy wrote:
>
> A major drawback of using RI is that it tends to make your application
> database vendor specific. If you intend building apps that will be used by
> different brands of databases I'd say putting the RI in your app is a good
> thing.
>
> Another reason for not using RI is that RI is designed to stop people who
> aren't experts from doing stupid things. Quite often there are very good
> reasons for circumventing RI in the application (particularly during data
> conversion projects or providing data importing facilities). For conversions
> I guess you could just drop the constraints, do the conversion and then put
> them back on. For importing it may not be that easy.
>
> If none of these issues apply to your environment then I think your DBA just
> doesn't like work....

This may be true...but I've found that any product that is developed to be database-independent generally ends up running poorly on all the target platforms. And you get great things like:

"Yes its database independent, but you have to use ODBC drivers from company X, and is has to be deployed on Windows version Y"

which makes the "independent" concept somewhat moot.

hth
connor

-- 
==============================
Connor McDonald

http://www.oracledba.co.uk

"Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue..."