Re: Data Constraints AND Application Constraints

-CELKO- wrote:
> I agree with you about checking data at each tier.
>
> But what I would really like is to have a "rules engine" that would
> help me generate SQL check constraints as well as 3GL if statements. I
> would also like to have my tool put the rules together in a decision
> table or something similar so I can validate and optimize them.

This is a most interesting comment in my context...as I am currently "tooling" around with a greenfield opportunity which will employ amongst other things an SQL DBMS (no surprises there).

Because I am basically lazy (and want a life too), but have extreme paranoiac tendencies when trusting computers (actually I really mean their creators) to get it right, I reached a conundrum on how to produce lots of reliable code without employing an army of hungry slaves.

The currently favoured solution has been to write a script (perl as it happens) that parses a very terse text file (basically a schema plus a bit more) and generate scripts (so far) for:

. database create and user defined types
. table and index create (100% rerunable for easy schema upgrades)
. triggers etc
. stored procs for insert, update, delete, archive
. ACL's
. core static data (self description and other stuff)
. it also places standard prefix and postfix statements on externally 

As you might guess I eschew GUI based hacking in favour of a CLI style - just a throwback to my punched card days of building CDC OS's from source tapes!

The time to first gratification is of course a lot longer than clicking here or there but by golly does it scale up real fast when you want to add a new table or universally change some processing rule across the entire system!

Of course there are no doubt tools out there that could do at least some of this but I find I have less choice about what I will accept as the common (supported) denominators al la Kenneth's post this thread - and I'm sure I have some Scottish ancestry too! Cheers, Frank. Received on Sat Mar 19 2005 - 06:49:01 CET