Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

From: Robert Martin <unclebob_at_objectmentor.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:28:00 -0400
Message-ID: <2006062015280035001-unclebob_at_objectmentorcom>


On 2006-06-02 18:26:11 -0400, frebe73_at_gmail.com said:

> But the big question that you repeatedly refuses to answer is why you
> possibly want to change from Oracle to flat files?

There are systems that are simpler to build using flat files. Think of a text editor. On the other hand, there are customer who demand interfaces to relational DBs. It would be nice if the application was agnostic on this point.

One application I have worked on recently that made use of this agnosticism is FitNesse. The wiki pages are not just blobs of text, but have structured elements to them too. FitNesse has two basic storage mechanisms. The first is "InRam". All the pages are simply kept in their caches, and never flushed to disk. The second is flat files, in which the caches are flushed to files.

Some time ago a user of FitNesse put an RDBMS back-end on it by implementing the data access and management interfaces to use MYSQL. It took him less than a day to make it work.

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Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 21:28:00 CEST

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